Record $2.2B in
December brought total
to $22.8B
BY PAOLO G. MONTECILLO
Philippine Daily Inquirer

THAT’S MY BOY. Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada visits his son, Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, at his Senate office to greet him on his birthday and give him

moral support amid accusations he pocketed tens of millions of pesos in pork barrel kickbacks. Also in photo are Estrada’s other son, Sen. JV
Ejercito, and Sen. Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr., who has also been implicated in the pork barrel scam.
PHOTO BY GRIG MONTEGRANDE

4-day work week pushed
amid hellish traffic jams
BY LEILA B. SALAVERRIA
Philippine Daily Inquirer
MANILA, PHILIPPINES—The prospect of hellish traffic jams in Metro Manila with two major road projects beginning simultaneously on Monday night
has prompted a Quezon City lawmaker
to revive his push for a four-day work

week for government employees to help
ease the anticipated gridlock.
Quezon City Rep. Winston Castelo,
who chairs the House committee on
Metro Manila development, said his
proposal would reduce the commuting
time for state employees and provide a
measure of comfort by giving them an

❱❱ PAGE 15 Remittances hit

Manny Pacquiao starts gym training
❱❱ PAGE 8

❱❱ PAGE 8 4-day work

CASH SENT home by migrant workers,
one of the main drivers of the country’s
economic growth, rose to record levels
last year despite the continued weakness of the global economy.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP)
Monday reported that growth in remittances from overseas Filipino workers
(OFWs) beat expectations in 2013, helping prop up consumer demand despite
the high unemployment in the country.
“The solid growth of remittances from

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

FRIDAY 2

ANG PANGAKO AY HABANG
BUHAY, 'DI ANG KONTRATA
SA TELEPONO.

no term contracts

www.canadianinquirer.net

Philippine News

3 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Solons want to clip Ombudsman’s powers
BY LEILA B. SALAVERRIA
Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE HOUSE committee on justice
wants to amend the Ombudsman law, or
Republic Act No. 6770, to favor officials
facing complaints.
It has approved a measure seeking to
limit the power of the Office of the Ombudsman to preventively suspend officials and to cut in half the six-month
suspension period. It also seeks to
amend the rule on the finality of Ombudsman decisions.
A preventive suspension is issued to remove an accused official from the scene
during an investigation but is not an indication of guilt or intended to be a penalty.
Under the proposed changes, in cases
where the penalty is other than public
censure, reprimand or suspension of
more than one month’s salary, the ruling
shall be implemented only after the period of appeal shall have lapsed.
As for the power to suspend, the bill
would have the Ombudsman issue preventive suspensions only against officials still in the position from which the
charges arose, unless there was a great
possibility their continuing in their
present position would influence wit-

Authored by Rep. Niel Tupas Jr. (in photo),
a measure seeking to limit the power of the
Office of the Ombudsman to preventively
suspend officials and to cut in half the six-month
suspension period has been approved by the
House committee on justice.
PHOTO FROM GMANETWORK.COM

nesses or alter the evidence.
The justice committee approved the
measure despite opposition from Deputy
Ombudsman for Luzon Gerard Mosquera.
Authored by committee chair Niel Tupas Jr., it is intended to ensure that pre-

LTO, LTFRB blamed for
spate of bus accidents
BY JERRY E. ESPLANADA
Philippine Daily Inquirer
JESUS ARRANZA, the chair of the
800-member Federation of Philippine
Industries (FPI), yesterday said both
the Land Transportation Franchising
and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) and
the Land Transportation Office (LTO)
shared part of the blame for the recent
spate of tragic bus accidents because of
their failure to do their jobs.
“It’s time for top officials and other
personnel of these two agencies to wake
up,” Arranza said in a statement.
He described as “alarming” the observation that “these two agencies merely
react when deaths occur in vehicular
mishaps” instead of meticulously implementing roadworthy standards in the
transportation industry.
“Had the LTFRB and LTO done their
jobs, that is, monitoring round-theclock the franchises and operations of
bus companies, then serious road accidents involving buses and other public
utility vehicles could have been prevented,” Arranza said.
In a statement, the FPI head pointed

out that these agencies “share the blame
for non-roadworthy vehicles plying
routes nationwide.”
“It is only now that they are discovering that the GV Florida Transport bus
involved in the Feb. 7 crash in Bontoc,
Mountain Province that killed at least
14 passengers was not even registered
under the name of the said company,” he
noted.
“Moreover, the bus’ license plates did
not match with the engine & chassis.
Worse, it was also discovered that the
bus had double license plates,” he added.
According to Arranza, “the public is
confronted with a bigger problem: that
the LTFRB and LTO merely react as
their respective investigations are made
after the fact or after a mishap had already happened.”
The LTFRB ordered all of the estimated 250 buses of Florida off the road as
part of the 30-day suspension meted on
the bus firm.”
With main terminals in Sampaloc,
Manila, and Cubao, Quezon City, Florida plies routes to over 40 key cities and
towns in the Ilocos region, Cagayan Valley and Cordillera Administrative Region. ■

ventive suspensions would be imposed
not as a penalty or tool for harassment
but as a necessary move to prevent a
public official from interfering with or
delaying an investigation, Tupas said.
He said there were instances in the
past when a preventive suspension was
ordered where the official concerned
was no longer in the post from which the
complaint arose. In this case, the official
was no longer in a position to influence
the investigation.
“What happens is it becomes a penalty. The primary purpose of a preventive
suspension is not a penalty,” he said during the committee hearing.
On questioning by Misamis Occidental Rep. Henry Oaminal, however, Tupas acknowledged there were instances
when this was not the case, such as when
the official moved from being vice mayor to mayor.
The Ombudsman would still be able to
suspend an official whose new post puts
him in position to influence an investigation involving his former post.
Tupas also said that reducing the period of preventive suspension from six
months to three was necessary because
six months was too long, especially for
an elected official.
In seeking to amend the law on the

finality of the Ombudsman’s decisions,
Tupas said the current rule states that
an appeal would not stop the implementation of the decision.
This means that if an official is ordered dismissed, he would not be able to
serve in his present post while appealing
the ruling.
Tupas said this was contrary to jurisprudence and was unfair, especially to
elected officials.
Mosquera, at the hearing, insisted on
the Ombudsman’s power to issue preventive suspensions, saying that even if
an official were in a position other than
the one where the complaint originated,
he could still use his office to influence
the investigation.
He said the Ombudsman should be
able to issue preventive suspensions
ex parte, or without notifying the other
party, since the respondents may be able
to file pleadings to delay their suspension and give them time to tamper with
the evidence or get to the witnesses.
He also said the six-month preventive
suspension period should be retained.
If the suspension period were reduced, there was a possibility of the official returning to his post and continuing
the acts for which he was suspended, he
said. ■

LIFE INSURANCE:

IS THIS
YOUR
POLICY?
FaithLife Financial is a reliable not-for-profit insurance provider
that helps people build solid financial plans based on Christian
principles. Exchange a hope for a plan to make an impact on
what matters most — your family!

Visit faithlifefinancial.ca to learn more about
our investment and insurance solutions.

Before he was ‘Sexy,’ Jinggoy was
‘Anak,’ Sen. Loi was ‘Inay’
BY NANCY C. CARVAJAL
Philippine Daily Inquirer
BEFORE “SEXY,” Sen. Jinggoy Estrada was given the code
name “Anak” and his mother,
former Sen. Loi Estrada, was
“Inay,” according to sworn
statements issued to the National Bureau of Investigation.
Loi Estrada, like her son,
channeled some of her allocations under the Priority Development Assistance Fund
(PDAF) to nongovernment organizations (NGOs) controlled
by Janet Lim-Napoles, according to the statements executed
by Benhur Luy.
But Luy, the principal whistle-blower in the P10-billion
pork barrel scam, said the NGOs
implemented the mother’s
projects and that she received a
40percent commission.
Jinggoy Estrada, together
with Senators Juan Ponce Enrile and Ramon Revilla Jr., Napoles and 34 others, is facing a

plunder complaint in the Office
of the Ombudsman in connection with allegations that PDAF
allocations went to ghost projects or kickbacks. They have
denied wrongdoing.
NBI witnesses, in their sworn
affidavits, had submitted notebooks containing records of
Napoles’ alleged deals with the
lawmakers.
Enrile, Estrada and Revilla
were referred to in the notebooks
by their code names “Tanda,”
“Sexy” and “Pogi,” respectively.
In an interview with the INQUIRER, Luy said Jinggoy Estrada had persuaded his mother
to allocate her PDAF to Napoles.
“The projects of Senator Loi
were fully implemented, but
like her son’s projects a commission of 40 percent was also
deducted from the project’s
amount,” said Luy, a former
employee of Napoles, who is
under detention allegedly for
holding Luy hostage to prevent
him from revealing her activities to authorities.

Luy also said that Napoles
gave Loi Estrada the “Inay” code
name. He said Jinggoy’s code
name was changed from “Anak”
to “Sexy” after the senator went
dieting and lost weight.
Luy said actor Mat Ranillo
acted as conduit in the transactions of Loi Estrada.
One document obtained by
the INQUIRER showed Jinggoy’s mother wrote then Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap
on May 9, 2005, requesting
transfer of her PDAF with special allotment release order
(Saro) E-05-00181 dated Jan.
24, 2005, to the Philippine Social Development Foundation,
a Napoles dummy organization.
Another document also
showed that Loi Estrada in a
letter on Jan. 11, 2006, to then
Agriculture Secretary Domingo
Panganiban directed that P10
million of her PDAF with Saro
No. ROCS-0507-593 dated Dec.
29, 2005, be channeled through
the Ginintuang Masaganang
Ani Rice and Corn program of

www.canadianinquirer.net

Before “Sexy,” Sen. Jinggoy Estrada (left)was given the code name “Anak”
and his mother, former Sen. Loi Estrada (right), was “Inay,” according to sworn
statements issued to the National Bureau of Investigation.
PHOTO FROM SOLARNEWS.PH

former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Loi Estrada said the allocation was for the implementation of agricultural livelihood
projects through another Napoles organization, the Masaganang Ani Para sa Magsasaka
Foundation.
Loi Estrada again wrote Yap
on Feb. 7, 2007, to allocate P23
million of her PDAF to the municipalities in Surigao del Norte,
Surigao del Sur and Agusan del
Sur with Saro No. ROCS0607680 dated Nov. 22, 2006, to
the same Napoles dummy organization, Masaganang Ani.
Jinggoy Estrada also wrote
Panganiban in a letter on Aug.

15, 2005, asking for the transfer P30 million of his PDAF to
another Napoles NGO—People’s Organization for Progress
and Development Foundation
Inc.—to implement his project
under Saro No. E-04-948 dated
Dec. 15, 2004. The document
received by the secretary’s office on Oct. 11, 2005, also bore a
marginal note with an instruction to Director Ricardo Regis
to expedite the process. Jinggoy Estrada also wrote Regis on
Sept. 18, 2006, to allocate P10
million of his PDAF to municipalities in Surigao del Norte and
Agusan del Norte with Saro No.
ROCS- 06-03101 dated June 16,
2006, for livelihood programs. ■

Philippine News

5 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Focus pork scam probe on
Philforest–Belmonte

P-Noy forms human
rights claims board

BY LEILA B. SALAVERRIA
Philippine Daily Inquirer

BY MICHAEL LIM UBAC
Philippine Daily Inquirer

PHILIPPINE FOREST Corp.
(Philforest) should be the focus
of investigation in the alleged
diversion to dubious nongovernment organizations (NGOs)
of P100 million worth of pork
barrel funds, Speaker Feliciano
Belmonte Jr. said.
Belmonte told reporters that
authorities should investigate the Commission on Audit
(COA) report that found that
Philforest had released the
funds to eight NGOs that were
either ill-equipped for the projects given to them or could not
be found in their addresses.
But Belmonte also gave the
benefit of the doubt to claims
that allocations—ranging from
P210,000 to P13.45 million—
the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and
Malacañang’s Disbursement
Acceleration Program (DAP)
went to these organizations.
“The appropriate authorities
should investigate, but I think a
lot of the congressmen were in
good faith. The IA (implementing agency) should of course be
the center of the investigation,”
Belmonte said.
Budget Secretary Florencio
Abad washed his hands of any
culpability in the alleged scam.
“How a project is implemented,” he said in a text message to
the INQUIRER, “is wholly up
to the implementing agency, or
Philforest in this case.”
Members of the House of
Representatives have an annual allocation of P70 million
under the PDAF, which was
augmented after the creation
in 2011 of the DAP, an impounding mechanism for government
savings purportedly used to
pump prime the economy.
The COA has said that the
PDAF- and DAP-funded projects coursed through Philforest should have been awarded
to NGOs through mandatory
bidding instead of being contracted out.
The P100-million came from
22 lawmakers consisting of two
senators and 20 House members,
mostly from party-list groups.

A YEAR after being pressed
by rights advocates, President
Aquino finally announced the
composition of a board that
would compensate the harms
suffered by human rights victims under martial law.
Mr. Aquino named as chairperson to the Human Rights
Victims’ Claims Board retired
Police Director Lina-CastilloSarmiento and appointed as
members Wilfred Asis, Galuasch Ballaho, Byron Bocar, Jose
Luis Martin Gascon, Glenda
Litong, Jacqueline Veloria Mejia, Aurora Corazon Parong and
Erlinda Senturias.
The board was created pursuant to the provisions of Republic Act No. 10368, otherwise
known as the Human Rights
Victims’ Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013.
Mr. Aquino signed into law
RA 10368 at the 27th anniversary of Edsa People Power Revolution in February last year.
Sarmiento, who retired last
month, is the first female police official to be promoted to
second-star rank in the maledominated Philippine National
Police (PNP).
When she received two stars
in June 2012, she became the
PNP’s first female third level
official to hold the rank of director equivalent to that of a
major general in the military.
Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares had earlier castigated the President for
dilly-dallying on
implementing
the law,
w h i c h
Congress
passed to afford victims
of martial law
their
long-delayed recognition
and reparation.
The compensation
will be sourced from the
recovered P10-billion illgotten wealth of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
In a privilege speech last December, Colmenares criticized

Umali recollection

In an earlier phone inter-

Belmonte told reporters that authorities should investigate the COA report
that found that Philforest had released the funds to eight NGOs that were
either ill-equipped for the projects given to them or could not be found in their
addresses.

view, Oriental Mindoro Rep.
Reynaldo Umali, one of those
mentioned in the COA report,
said he remembered choosing an NGO to implement his
project upon the prodding of
Philforest, which has a list of its
accredited groups.
“My recollection is we were
made to choose from among
those groups,” Umali said. He
surmised that this was the procedure because Philforest was
a small agency that was unable
to handle all of the lawmakers’
projects.
But he also said that the project he funded under Philforest
was implemented. The main
beneficiary of the funds, which
the COA said amounted to P13.5
million, was his Unified Tree of
Life Program that intended to
plant 12,012,012 trees.
So far, some 3 million trees
have been planted in his district, he said. The program,
launched on Dec. 12, 2012, continues up to today, he added.
Aklan Rep. Teodorico Haresco, who was Kasangga partylist representative in 2012, also
said yesterday that the implementers of his projects came
from the Philforest list.
Haresco said that his small
office had nothing to do with
accrediting
these
groups.
The P1.05 million he coursed
through Philforest was for the
reforestation of areas devastated by Tropical Storm “Sendong” in 2011, he added.
Tañada denial

Former Quezon Rep. Lorenzo
Tañada III denied allegations
that P7 million of his PDAF

PHOTO FROM PH.NEWS.YAHOO.COM

funds went to a “ghost project”
and asserted that Philforest implemented in 2012 the planting
of trees in the Maulawin Watershed.
According to Tañada, he and
local officials of the municipality of Guinayangan, Quezon
province, along with residents,
farmers, and students were
present when the project was
implemented to provide livelihood projects and produce
fruit-bearing trees. The project
also involved planting propagules to rehabilitate the mangrove area in Guinayangan, he
added.
“I am willing to cooperate
with the COA to help clarify
questions they may have on this
matter,” he said.
The other lawmakers whose
funds Philforest released to
supposedly questionable NGOs
were Senators Gregorio Honasan II and Lito Lapid, and
Representatives
Raymond
Democrito Mendoza, Fatima
Dimaporo, Isidro Q. Lico, Antonio Alvarez, Michael Angelo
C. Rivera, Salvador P. Cabaluna
III, Rodolfo G. Valencia, Jose S.
Aquino II, Ponciano D. Payuyo,
Hadjiman HatamanSulliman,
Joel Roy R. Duavit, Nelson Dayanghirang, Nicanor M. Briones,
Jose Benjamin Benaldo, Maria
Isabelle G. Climaco, Yevgeny
Vicente B. Emano and Robert
Raymund Estrella.
There has been greater scrutiny on the role of NGOs in
implementing public projects
following disclosures that P10
billion in pork barrel funds
ended in kickbacks and phantom projects. ■
www.canadianinquirer.net

the President for his failure to
swiftly appoint members of the
board that would oversee the distribution of the P10 billion fund.
He noted that several human
rights groups had long submitted nominees for the board positions.
Without the board, which
would also be tasked to come
up with the implementing rules
and regulations, the process
of compensating the victims
could not begin, Colmenares
said.
The militant lawmaker even
asked Congress at the time to
exercise its power of oversight
and investigate the alleged
nonimplementation of the law
that it approved.
At a briefing, Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma said the President had not
given the board a timetable for
the compensation process.
But Coloma said the board
was expected to observe a
“sense of urgency” on account
of the victims who have been
waiting for compensation from
the government for over four
decades.
“They have a sense of urgency
in facing up to their new duties,”
said Coloma of the members of
the compensation board.
But Coloma said the “expectations” or duties of the board
were contained in Section 10
(powers and functions of the
board) such as “receive, evaluate, process and investigate applications for claims.” ■

Philippine News

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

FRIDAY 6

US backs rule of law in sea row
BY TARRA QUISMUNDO
AND NIKKO DIZON
Philippine Daily Inquirer
A VISITING United States official has reaffirmed the US
government’s support for international law and the rules of
discipline in the disputed territories of the West Philippine
Sea (a portion of the South China Sea), saying that America’s
focus remained on maintaining
peace and stability in the Asia
Pacific.
Scot Marciel, principal deputy assistant secretary at the
US Department of State’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific
Affairs, also reiterated US support for a peaceful means of resolving the dispute, including
the Philippines’ right to take its
case against China to a United
Nations arbitral tribunal to
clarify maritime boundaries in
the contested waters.
“What we’ve emphasized is
the importance of all claimant
states following international
law, and kind of agreed-upon
rules of behavior during the pe-

riod when these disputes were
under way,” Marciel said in an
interview at the US Embassy.
Marciel is on a visit to the
region for a “reorientation”
on the Philippines and other
Southeast Asian countries
(Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and
Vietnam), touching base with
his counterparts in the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA)
and with observers of developments in the Philippines. He
left the country.
“So whenever you look at
what we say publicly, it’s always
about maintaining the peace,
the stability that’s critical to
prosperity in the region but
also urging all the claimants,
including China, to follow sort
of rules and international law,”
the US official said.
It was amid these escalating
tensions that Washington announced its “pivot” to the Asia
Pacific, which Marciel said represented the Obama administration’s commitment to be
“intensively engaged with the
region in every way—diplomatically, economically, [through]
people-to-people relations, se-

curity,” among others.
He said the United States remained a neutral player in the
dispute but it was supportive of
efforts to peacefully resolve the
matter, including the push for a
legally binding code of conduct
in the South China Sea and legal remedies such as the Philippines’ arbitration case before
the UN tribunal.
Marciel said the United States
continued to value its relationship with China, underlined by
the visit of US Secretary of State
John Kerry to Beijing as part of
a four-city swing through Asia,
Kerry’s fifth visit to the region
as America’s top diplomat.
As it builds up its defense
capability amid regional security concerns, the Philippines is
now negotiating an agreement
with Washington for greater US
military presence in the country.
While not involved in the negotiations, Marciel described
the talks as an “overall effort”
to find “21st century ways” of
ensuring “interoperability” between the Philippine and US
militaries in the areas of de-

www.canadianinquirer.net

fense and
disaster response.
“It’s really
an effort by
both sides to
build a very
modern and effective
defense
relationship or to strengthen
what’s already a good relationship,” he said.
In a related development, the
Department of National Defense (DND) yesterday made
the rare move of reacting to a
statement by a ranking US general who criticized President
Aquino’s recent call for international support against China’s aggressive behavior in the
West Philippine Sea.
On Monday, US Gen. Herbert
Carlisle cautioned Mr. Aquino
and Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe against making provocative statements amid the
rising tensions between China
on one side and the Philippines
and Japan on the other.
“We believe the Philippines’
defense and military establishments have exercised maximum

restraint
with respect to
the situation in the West Philippine Sea. Based on previous
occurrences, it is clear the Philippines has been the object of
harassment,” the DND said in a
statement released.
“We believe that in opposing aggressive and expansionist behavior, the Philippines
is not only serving its national
interests, but also serving the
region’s as well, including all
states that have a stake in freedom of navigation and clear
territorial rights as defined
under the principles of Unclos
(the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea),” the
DND said.
The four-paragraph statement was probably the strongest which the defense department has directed at a US
military official commenting
on the dispute with China. ■

BAFFLED BY the high unemployment rate, President
Aquino quizzed the Cabinet
on its “action plan for poverty
reduction” as the benefits of a
strong economy were eluding
the country’s middle class and
poor.
Mr. Aquino presided over a
rare full Cabinet meeting that
included Vice President Jejomar Binay in the Aguinaldo
State Dining Room of Malacañang.
The meeting came after the
media reported a finding of a
Social Weather Stations (SWS)
survey that the unemployment
rate rose to 27.5 percent, or an
estimated 12.1 million, as 2.5
million Filipinos joined the
ranks of the jobless between
September and December last
year.
The unemployment rate
soared even as the economy
surprisingly grew 7.2 percent,
the second-fastest after China’s, showing that the economic
growth was not inclusive.
The unemployment rate was
6 percentage points higher than
the 21.7 percent (some 9.6 million) in the previous quarter,
according to the SWS survey.
Mr. Aquino “prayed for God’s
guidance” at the start of the
meeting, Malacañang said.
At press time, the Cabinet
was still discussing the action
plan as well as the “strategic
framework of human development and poverty reduction,”
Communications
Secretary
Herminio Coloma said in a text
message he sent to members of
the media.
The action plan for poverty
reduction is indispensable to
the Aquino administration’s
goal of “inclusive growth.” Poverty incidence in the country
stood at 25.2 percent in 2012.
“We are focusing on job creation in manufacturing and
more highly remunerative sectors,” Coloma said, when asked
by reporters why, despite the
strong capital inflows, the level
of joblessness was growing.
Coloma said the conditional
cash transfer program and programs of the Technical Educa-

Faces of poverty

Trade liberalization

Margie Sta. Ana, 55, said
she did not feel the economic
growth.
“It’s even hard to find a job
even if you are a college graduate,” said Sta. Ana, who worked
as a factory worker for 30 years.
She lives with her sickly husband under the stairs of a dilapidated two-story apartment
in Makati City because they can
no longer afford the rent.
Like Sta. Ana, Astro Camitan,
25, said he also didn’t enjoy the
benefits of the country’s growing economy.
“They (corrupt officials)
pocket the people’s fund instead of using it to help the
needy,” said Camitan, a father
of one and works as a tricycle
driver. “What progress are they
talking about if they are the
only ones who benefit from it?”
Allies and critics alike of
the administration as well as
economists and a multilateral
agency put forward various
proposals to address the unemployment problem.
Instead of blaming calamities for the soaring number of
jobless Filipinos, the government should focus on having
labor-intensive infrastructure
projects that would achieve the
twin goals of providing jobs and
reconstructing devastated areas, said Akbayan Rep. Walden
Bello.
Reacting to the SWS findings, presidential spokesperson
Edwin Lacierda said the unemployment rate increased in the
last quarter because of the calamities that hit the country.
Contractualization

But while this was the case,
Bello said the increasing number of the unemployed could
also be attributed to existing
policies on labor contractualization, a scheme in which
workers are let go after six
months so that employers will
not hire them on a regular basis
and thus pay for their benefits.
Three labor groups—Trade
Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), Partido ng
Manggagawa (PM) and Ki-

PM chair Renato Magtubo
said that while climate change
was becoming a big threat to
the Philippines, the primary
culprits behind the rising unemployment levels were trade
liberalization, lack of an industrial program and privatization-led growth model.
Industrialization

TUCP executive vice president Gerardo Seno said the
government must continue to
attract new job-creating investments, build new roads, bridges, and sea ports and airports,
and lower electricity rate if it
wanted to effectively address
the unemployment problem.
KMU attributes the high unemployment rate to dependence
on foreign investments, alleged
failure to implement genuine
land reform and absence of national industrialization.
The Asian Development
Bank (ADB), in a recent publication titled “Taking the Right
Road to Inclusive Growth,” said
the failure of the country to
boost its industrial sector was
a key reason why its economic
growth remained far from being inclusive.
“The Philippine economy’s
chronic problems of high unemployment, slow poverty reduction and low investment are
reflections of the sluggish industrialization,” the ADB said.
Manufacturing

The ADB said the industrial
sector, which included manufacturing, should be the one
driving the economy to substantially reduce unemployment and poverty.
Growth of the Philippine
economy over the past decade,
however, has been driven by the
service sector, which includes
the business process outsourcing (BPO) subsector.
While the BPO sector in particular and the overall services
sector in general have provided
economic gains, these are not
responsive to the need for inclusive growth.
According to the ADB, the inwww.canadianinquirer.net

President Aquino quizzed the Cabinet on its “action plan for poverty reduction”
as the benefits of a strong economy were eluding the country’s middle class
and poor.
PHOTO FROM JSNCRUZ.COM

dustrial sector, compared with
the service sector, has the better ability to create job opportunities for the poor. Also, the
industrial sector has a much
higher multiplier effect on the
economy.
The ADB suggested more
government support for the
industrial sector through investments in education, skills
training and infrastructure to
achieve inclusive economic
growth.
Economists’ take

Economists said it would
take a while before the country’s economic growth would
translate into significant drop
in unemployment and poverty.
When an economy takes a
highgrowth trajectory, businesses do not immediately
hire more workers. They only
do so when they are convinced
that robust economic growth is
sustainable, said Victor Abola,
an economics professor at the
University of Asia and the Pacific.
“Initially, they (businesses)
will just require existing workers to work overtime,” Abola
told the INQUIRER.
Benjamin Diokno, an economics professor at the University of the Philippines, said
economic growth did not always equate to a drop in the
unemployment rate. In the
case of the Philippines, he said,
many recent investments were
capital-intensive but not laborintensive.
“Most public and private
construction can be characterized as large-scale, capital intensive. Even the multi-billion
school building program was
implemented by big-time contractors using capital intensive
or labor-saving technologies,”
Diokno told the INQUIRER.

Diokno said the Philippines
needed to invest more in sectors that were labor-intensive
and job-generating in order
to see a drop in the unemployment rate.
Human development

At the full Cabinet meeting,
the President was briefed on
“jobs challenge and human development” by the Department
of Education, Commission on
Higher Education, Tesda, Department of Labor and Employment, and Department of Trade
and Industry.
Other issues discussed with
the President were “protecting the poor and the vulnerable
(social protection).” The Department of Social Welfare and
Development, Department of
Health, and Housing and Urban
Development
Coordinating
Council led the discussions.
The Department of the Interior and Local Government
and Department of Science and
Technology discussed “crosscutting concerns and support
for human development and
poverty reduction,” while the
agriculture, environment and
agrarian reform departments
zeroed in on “rural development and poverty focus,” said
Coloma.
Coloma said a special presentation on “Fish Settlement”
in the wake of Supertyphoon
“Yolanda” was also made by the
National Anti-Poverty Commission.
Besides antipoverty issues,
the President and his Cabinet
also tackled issues dealing with
peace and order, and disasters.
The Cabinet secretaries also
discussed with the President
several measures that were
consistent with the administration’s “social contract” with the
Filipino people. ■

Philippine News

FEBRUARY 21, 2014 FRIDAY 8

Manny Pacquiao
starts gym training

4-day work...
extra day off.
This is especially
important now in
light of the looming traffic
jams expected to result from
the construction of the Skyway
project to connect South Luzon
Expressway on Gil Puyat Avenue in Makati City to the North
Luzon Expressway in Balintawak, Quezon City, and the
construction of Ninoy Aquino
International Airport Expressway Phase 2 to the Entertainment City gambling hub.
To make up for the extra
nonworking day, government
workers would have to work
for 10 hours a day instead of the
usual eight hours, according to
Castelo.
The 10-hour, four-day work
week complements a recent
proposal from traffic officials
to limit school days from five to
four days a week as well.
“Our workers serve as our
economic backbone. We should
not close our eyes to their difficulties, especially now that major infrastructure projects are
on their way for their construction,” Castelo told reporters on
Monday.
“At no better time than now
when megaroad projects in
Metro Manila have gotten under way that proactive experimentation should take place,”
he added.
The House has long been
observing the four-day work
week, Castelo said, and this has
resulted in government savings,
among other things. He said the
cutback had not compromised
service or productivity.
The lawmaker said his bill, if
approved, could lead to 20-percent in savings in work expenses, such as transportation fare
and food for the state employees. Employers, on the other
hand, could save on maintenance costs and overtime pay
for workers.
❰❰ 1

Better productivity

The shortened work week
could also lead to better productivity because it would help
workers to be more focused on
their tasks, he said.
The extra rest day would
give government workers more
time to spend with their families or pursue leisure activities,
and this could make them more
revitalized and motivated, Castelo said.
They could even use the additional day off to hone their

BY ROY LUARCA
Philippine Daily Inquirer
MANILA,
PHILIPPINES—
Fighter of the Decade Manny
Pacquiao returned to the gym
Monday and did light workouts
with Filipino trainer Buboy
Fernandez.
Trusted assistant Roger Fernandez told the Inquirer that

Pacquiao and Buboy did five
rounds with the mitts and then
two rounds each with the speed
ball, double end ball and the
heavy bags plus two rounds of
skipping rope at Pacman Wild
Card Gym in Gen. Santos City.
Pacquiao will try to regain
his World Boxing Organization
welterweight crown from Timothy Bradley on April 12 in Las
Vegas. ■

Artist’s vision for the Skyway 3 project.
PHOTO FROM ABS-CBNNEWS.COM

skills so that they would be
more competitive in the labor
market, he added.
Castelo said he decided to refile his bill in the 16th Congress
even before the megaroad projects took off because he had observed that many workers were
being stressed out by worsening daily traffic and becoming
less productive.
Members of the House independent bloc said they would
invite public works, traffic and
other officials involved in the
14.8-kilometer Skyway project
to a hearing to provide details
of the impending road works.
Leyte Rep. Ferdinand Martin
Romualdez said having more indepth data about the major road
projects would help Congress
come up with ways to mitigate
the effects of the road works.
Romualdez said this should
not be taken as opposition to
progress. “We wish it would’ve
come earlier… so we’re stuck
with a much delayed and lastminute project,” he said.
He also said the public should
know how much the toll would
be once the Skyway extension
is completed because this could
also lead to increased fares and
trigger a demand for higher
salaries.
Brace for the worst

Residents of the capital went
through the usual traffic snarls
that would likely worsen in the
coming years as the Aquino administration belatedly imple-

ments 15 infrastructure projects.
“We are informing the general public to brace for the
traffic situation that we will be
encountering for the next four
years,” Francisco Manalo, executive director of the capital’s
traffic office, said as angry commuters took to social media to
vent their frustrations.
Manalo warned that once
construction begins, travel on
the city’s main roads will be reduced to a crawling speed of 1
to 9 kilometers per hour, compared to the already slow, normal 20 kph.
Motorists and commuters
fearful of getting stuck on the
roads left home earlier than
usual on Monday. But with so
many vehicles on the road as
the day began, traffic in and
around Manila was snarled for
hours in the morning.
“Traffic armageddon begins
in Manila!!” tweeted San Crisselle Tiu, while Chay1007 said
she had to bring an “extra [supply] of patience.”
Once actual construction
begins, it can take a vehicle at
least two hours to travel the
19-km stretch of the city’s main
thoroughfare, warned Vicente
Lizada, spokesman for the Metropolitan Manila Development
Authority’s traffic monitoring
office. The authority has asked
contractors to provide staff to
help direct traffic. ■
With a report from AFP
www.canadianinquirer.net

PHOTO FROM HBO.COM

Jinggoy Estrada decries
prejudgment
BY TJ A. BURGONIO
Philippine Daily Inquirer
MANILA,
PHILIPPINES—
Protesting a colleague’s “threepoint shot” remark on the
testimony of pork barrel scam
witness Ruby Tuason against
him, Sen. Jinggoy Estrada on
Monday challenged the Senate
to convene the ethics committee to investigate him.
Taking the floor on his 51st
birthday, Estrada said Sen. Teofisto Guingona III had “prejudged” with his remarks using
terms in the game of basketball
the outcome of the blue ribbon
committee inquiry into the alleged misuse of P10 billion in
the lawmakers’ Priority Development Assistance Fund.
Estrada said he “almost fell
off” his seat when he heard Guingona, the committee chair,
conclude that Tuason’s testimony was not only a “threepoint shot, but a buzzer-beater
and a winning shot.”
“Is it right for a chair of the

committee to prejudge the outcome of any committee hearing?” he said, addressing Senate President Franklin Drilon.
“If he has already prejudged
the trial, that I am guilty, what’s
the reason to call another hearing? If you or anybody here
in the Senate has any goods
against me, the proper forum is
the Senate ethics committee,”
he added.
Unfair

Estrada said prejudging the
outcome of the hearing was
“unfair” to him and his colleagues implicated in the scandal.
None of the senators present
took up the challenge to convene the ethics committee. Guingona was not around.
Estrada, along with Senators Juan Ponce Enrile and
Ramon Revilla Jr., and the alleged brains of the scam, Janet
Lim-Napoles, are under investigation in the Office of the
❱❱ PAGE 13 Jinggoy Estrada

Philippine News

9 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Obama coming to visit PH in April
BY TARRA QUISMUNDO
Philippine Daily Inquirer
US
PRESIDENT
Barack
Obama is visiting the Philippines and three other Asian
countries in April on a tour
aimed at easing questions over
the staying power of his strategic shift to Asia, which is growing increasingly tense as China
flexes its muscles to intimidate
its rivals for territories in the
East China and South China
Seas.
The Philippines will be
Obama’s last stop, after visits to
Japan, South Korea and Malaysia, the White House said.
Obama’s visits to Manila and
Kuala Lumpur are intended
to make up for his no-show
when he canceled a previous
Asia tour in October last year
amid domestic political strife in
Washington.
“He will meet with President Aquino to highlight our
economic and security cooperation, including through the
modernization of our defense
alliance, efforts to expand economic ties and spark
economic growth through
the Partnership for Growth,
and through our deep and enduring people-to-people ties,”
the White House said in a statement released in Manila by the
US Embassy.
Malacañang said Obama
would visit the Philippines
on the invitation of President
Aquino.
Speaking to reporters in the
Palace, Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma said
Obama’s visit would “provide
a new momentum to Philippine-US relations” as well as
strengthen the two countries’
“partnership in many areas.”
Coloma dismissed insinuations that Obama’s visit could
be an afterthought since the
Philippines would be the last
stop on a four-country tour.

Not refueling stop

Asked if Manila would just
be a refueling stop for Obama
before heading home, Coloma
replied: “The United States is
one of the two strategic partners of our country, and that’s
the backdrop for all the visits of
the head of state of the US and
the visits of the head of state of
the Philippines to the [United
States] because we’re talking of
strategic partnership.”
A subtext to Obama’s visit
will be rising territorial tensions between several US allies
and China, which deepened
over Beijing’s recent declaration of an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea.
Beijing was also angered last
week when Washington stiffened its line on territorial disputes in the South China Sea,
calling for it to adjust or clarify
its claims.
US military presence

Obama’s visit comes amid negotiations between Manila and
Washington for increased rotations of US troops in the Philippines.
Said to be framed within the
62-year-old Mutual Defense
Treaty between the United
States and the Philippines, the
rotational agreement is part
of Obama’s pivot to Asia policy
and of the Philippines’ bid to
boost its external defense amid
a festering territorial dispute
with China in the West Philippine Sea, the part of the South
China Sea within Manila’s
370-kilometer exclusive economic zone.
While saying it does not take
sides in territorial disputes, the
United States has warned China not to declare a new air defense zone in the South China
Sea, which overlaps the West
Philippine Sea, and has many
times expressed support for
Philippine efforts to peacefully
settle the dispute, including
taking the matter to the Unit-

ed Nations for arbitration and
pushing for a maritime code of
conduct to prevent armed confrontations in the sea.
Besides the Philippines and
China, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan also have territorial claims in the South
China Sea.
Partnership for Growth

Obama is visiting Manila
as the United States pursues
implementation of the White
House-led Partnership for
Growth, which endeavors to
improve education, government, justice and financial systems in the Philippines through
collaborative engagement between US and Philippine officials and organizations.
The Philippines is one of only
four countries engaged with the
United States in the program.
The others are El Salvador,
Ghana and Tanzania.
A left-leaning group, Bagong
Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan),
promised to welcome Obama
with an “internationally coordinated” protest.
Northeast Asian allies

Obama’s stops in Japan and
South Korea will also bolster
close US alliances, at a time of
aggravated political tensions
between its two Northeast
Asian friends.
It was an open secret that
Obama would call in Japan in
April to take up an invitation
from Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe who took office in December 2012.
But the decision to add South
Korea to the trip came after rising pressure from Seoul and
from the Asia policy community in Washington.
The move also reflects a desire to signal to North Korean
leader Kim Jong-Un that there
are no gaps in the US and South
Korean resolve to counter
Pyongyang’s nuclear program
and belligerent rhetoric.

www.canadianinquirer.net

The Philippines will be Obama’s last stop, after visits to Japan, South Korea and
Malaysia, the White House said.
PHOTO BY MISTYDAWNPHOTO / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

It also indicates that Obama
is keen to avoid dealing a political slight to South Korean President Park Geun-hye that could
result from a presidential visit
to Tokyo and not one to Seoul.
Relations between the two
nations were severely rattled
by Abe’s December visit to the
Yasukuni Shrine, which honors
war criminals among Japan’s
war dead.
Obama’s Asia itinerary also
includes one noticeable exception—a stop in China. But he is
expected to return to the region
later in the year for regional
summits in Australia, Beijing
and Burma (Myanmar).
The White House said in a
statement that Obama’s April
trip would highlight his “ongoing commitment to increase US
diplomatic, economic and security engagement with countries
in the Asia-Pacific region.”
Free trade pact

Obama is certain to try to
push negotiations on a vast
Trans-Pacific Partnership free
trade pact that will include 12
nations, and is seen by some
observers as an attempt to meet
the economic challenge of a rising China.
The US president, however,
may encounter some skepticism from regional partners
because US Senate Democratic
Majority Leader Harry Reid, a
key Obama ally, has expressed
skepticism about granting him
expanded powers to negotiate
trade deals.

In light of Reid’s remarks,
Pacific Rim nations may be
loath to make concessions in
the trade talks, fearing that any
deal agreed may be modified by
the US Congress.
Obama will stop first in Japan
where he will meet Abe. Then
he will travel to Seoul for talks
with Park, likely to be dominated by North Korea’s latest
maneuvering on the divided
peninsula.
Pyongyang is currently fuming at the prospect of annual
US-South Korean military
exercises starting later this
month and that it views as an
act of war.
From Seoul, Obama will head
to Kuala Lumpur to meet Malaysian Prime Minister Najib
Razak to discuss deepening defense and military ties. Then he
travels to Manila on the last leg
of his tour.
The White House did not give
exact dates for the trip, other
than saying it would take place
in late April.
Obama has declared he is
America’s first “Pacific President” and announced a rebalancing of military and strategic
resources to the dynamic, fastgrowing region.
But the cancellation of his trip
last year and the departure from
his administration of big political hitters committed to the
Asia pivot, like former secretaries of state and defense Hillary
Clinton and Robert Gates, have
prompted some concern in the
region over US staying power. ■

Philippine News

FEBRUARY 21, 2014 FRIDAY 10

Ruby to detail kickbacks
Tuason testifies today at Senate pork probe
BY NANCY C. CARVAJAL
Philippine Daily Inquirer
ON THE EVE of her appearance before the Senate blue
ribbon committee, Ruby Tuason met for two hours with
five whistle-blowers to provide
details on how she delivered
alleged kickbacks to Sen. Juan
Ponce Enrile, through his aide,
and personally to Sen. Jinggoy
Estrada in the alleged P10billion pork barrel scam.
Tuason, who confessed she
arranged lavish parties for Janet Lim-Napoles, the supposed
mastermind behind the racket,
and later became her bagman,
will read a prepared statement
before submitting herself to
questioning by the senators,
according to a source who attended the meeting in the National Bureau of Investigation
headquarters.
“The speech will give the gist
of her involvement and reason
of her coming out and more,”
the source said.
The source said the meeting
between Tuason and thewhistle-blowers led by Benhur Luy
mostly covered “confirmation
of events and transactions.”
“Tuason did not have her
own records but confirmed the
listings and numbers that appeared in the daily transaction
records of Luy,” the source said,
referring to transactions with
the lawmakers.

Tuason, who is known to
cook for friends, brought with
her homemade sandwiches
that she handed out during the
meeting. Lawyers from the Department of Justice asked her
to identify each whistleblower
who had earlier given testimony about the kickbacks.
Also present during the
meeting at the NBI were Marina Sula, Merlina Suñas, Arlene
Baltazar and Gertrudes Luy, all
former employees of Napoles
who have turned against her.
Tuason, who is a fellow suspect of Enrile and Estrada in
the plunder complaint being
investigated by the Office of
the Ombudsmand, confirmed
statements by Luy and Sula
about deliveries Tuason made
to Enrile’s former chief of staff,
Jessica Lucila “Gigi” Reyes, in
her house in Dasmariñas Village in Makati City, the source
said.
Commissions

Tuason also met for five
hours with the whistle-blowers
at the NBI and corroborated
statements about the delivery
of kickbacks for the use of the
senators’ allocations from the
Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).
Tuason earlier confirmed to
Luy that the commission she
handed to Reyes for using Enrile’s PDAF was P77 million for
the period 2007-2009, while
Estrada’swas P35 million, ac-

cording to the lawyer of the
whistle-blowers, Levito Baligod.
Luy had the same figure for
the alleged Enrile commissions
but his record for the money he
gave Estrada was only P9 million. Baligod said this was because Estrada went directly to
Napoles or used conduits.
Based on the records of the
two witnesses, the first transaction by Tuason involving Enrile’s PDAF was P31.9 million
coursed through the Department of Agriculture using Napoles’ bogus nongovernment
organization—People’s Organization for Progress and Development Foundation—with special allotment release order No.
BMB-E-0404-068, dated Dec.
14, 2004.
Tuason’s figure for the
amount given to Estradawas
smaller because the senator
used his former staff, Pauline
Labayen, to collect his purported payoff. Estrada also had used
as conduit for Napoles actor
Mat Ranillo.
The widow of the late Carlos
“Butch” Tuason, chair of the
Philippine Sports Commission,
left for the United States after
news of the pork barrel scandal
broke out in July last year. She
returned on Friday, saying she
wanted to clear her conscience
and turn state witness.
Both Estrada and Enrile have
denied any wrongdoing. Enrile
said Tuason was only a “casual”
acquaintance.

Ruby Tuason, the widow of the late Carlos “Butch” Tuason, chair of the
Philippine Sports Commission, left for the United States after news of the pork
barrel scandal broke out in July last year.
PHOTO FROM SOLARNEWS.PH

Expanded NBI probe

Also Justice Secretary Leila
de Lima said the NBI was looking into the possible involvement of Ranillo and Justa Tantoco, a friend of former Sen.
Loi Ejercito, in the pork barrel
scam following Tuason’s revelations.
“That’s being looked into because it’s our duty to investigate
new information provided by
this new whistle-blower, by the
new state witness, and we need
to pursue this,’’ De Lima told
reporters.
She said the case involving
Ranillo concerned the recovery
of “sums of money’’ from certain transactions he had with
Napoles. De Lima was referring
to a 2005 legal dispute between
Ranillo and Napoles’ JLN Corp.
in which Ranillo was sued for
payment of a vehicle.
A GMA News report said one
of the JLN Corp. vouchers submitted by Ranillo to the court
dated Aug.11, 2005, showed that
Estrada received “payment for

50 percent of P30 million rebate charge’’ worth P1.14 million.
Asked about Tantoco, De
Lima said she had no details yet
but added that “perhaps if that
is explored or pursued (today)
at the Senate hearing we might
have an answer.’’
De Lima is expected to attend
the resumption of the Senate
hearing.
Communications Secretary
Herminio Coloma said the Palace was expecting Tuason to
tell “nothing but the truth.”
“Perhaps, that’s also what
our people, not just those in the
government, want,” Coloma
told reporters in Filipino.
“Even ordinary people have
a very high interest in the outcome of this issue because they
know that this involves the alleged misuse of public funds,”
he said. “In all instances, we
want—the people want—to
know the truth because it’s
that would give justice to this
issue.” ■

Bus firm can’t blame bad roads–DPWH
BY JERRY E. ESPLANADA
Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE GV FLORIDA Transport’s
blaming the poor condition of
the road for the Feb. 7 fatal accident involving one of its buses
was “unbelievable,” said a Department of Public Works and
Highways official in Bontoc,
Mt. Province.
“It’s not true. That portion of
the Bontoc Nueva Vizcaya road
where the accident occurred is
well-maintained,” Wilbur Likigan, the district engineer in the
DPWH field office in Bontoc,
said in a phone interview.
He said there is a roving team

The wreckage of the Florida Transport bus is left at a farm in Barangay (village)
Talubin in Bontoc, Mt. Province. Strewn around it are personal belongings of
its passengers, 14 of whom had died and 32 others taken to hospitals in Mt.
Province, Baguio City and Metro Manila.
PHOTO BY RICHARD BALONGLONG / INQUIRER.NET

of road sweepers that makes
sure the entire stretch of the
road is free of sand particles,

stones, rocks and other loose
materials caused by landslides.
Likigan said it was “totally
www.canadianinquirer.net

unfair” to blame the condition
of the road for the crash of the
Florida Transport bus that left 14
people dead and 31 more injured.
“We’re inclined to believe it
was either mechanical failure
or the bus driver’s error that
may have caused the crash, definitely not the road condition,”
Likigan said.
Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board
Chair Winston Ginez said that
mechanical failure and the
driver’s negligence apparently
led to the tragedy.
The LTFRB has slapped a 30day suspension on all 228 units
of the GV Florida Transport after
discovering that the license plate

of the ill-fated public utility vehicle belonged to a bus owned by
another company, theMountain
Province Cable Tours (MPCT).
An initial LTFRB investigation found that theMPCT franchise and its buses were sold to
GV Florida Transport in September last year.
Driver Edgar Renon, who survived the crash, and the owners
of the firm, have been charged
with reckless imprudence resulting in multiple homicide
and multiple physical injuries.
The charges were based on
affidavits of survivors and witnesses who said the bus was
speeding on the sloping highway
before it fell into the ravine. ■

Philippine News

11 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Palace eyes road tax
for safety programs
BY MICHAEL LIM UBAC
Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE RASH of vehicular accidents has prompted the government to take a hard look at
how the P12-billion road user’s
tax, which is supposed to fund
road safety, is being utilized.
The total amount collected
from car owners each year under the tax, known as the motor
vehicle user’s charge (MVUC),
comes to around P10 billion,
according to Malacañang.
President Aquino is taking a
hands-on approach amid the
increasing frequency of accidents involving public buses.
“The President is meeting
shortly with the Department
of Transportation and Communications, Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) and Land
Transportation Office (LTO) to
discuss an action plan for preventing accidents and enhancing safety in public transportation,” said Communications
Secretary Herminio Coloma.
The LTFRB canceled the
franchise of Don Mariano
Transport Corp. (DMTC) on
Jan. 14 after the company’s

buses were involved in a string
of accidents, including the Skyway crash that killed at least 20
on Dec. 16.
The LTFRB is investigating
another more recent accident
involving a bus operated by GV
Florida which fell into a ravine
in Bontoc, Mountain Province,
killing 15 passengers.
Asked about the road user’s
tax, Coloma forwarded a text
message from Public Works
Secretary Rogelio Singson denying the rumors of possible
abuse in the utilization of the
fund.
“It’s being used properly,”
said Singson, but he added that
the “focus” was now on “road
maintenance and safety.”
The Road Board, which administers the road user’s tax, is
under the Department of Public
Works and Highways (DPWH).
Senate Pro Tempore Ralph
Recto said on Tuesday the
amount in road user’s tax collected last year from motor vehicle registration fees reached
P11.7 billion.
He urged the government to
tap a portion of the P11.7 billion
for road safety, saying road accidents were becoming a “national epidemic.” ■

Guingona: It’s a 3-pt shot
Tuason says she delivered P8-10M in cash to Estrada
BY NORMAN BORDADORA
AND TJ BURGONIO
Philippine Daily Inquirer
SEN. TEOFISTO Guingona III
compared her testimony to a
“three point shot that wasn’t
only a buzzer-beater but also
a winning shot” in the game of
basketball.
Guingona, chair of the Senate blue ribbon committee, said
it was the first time that a witness directly testified kickback
money was given to a senator.
“That is very, very essential,” he
said.
Ruby Tuason, 62, a former
Malacañang social secretary,
yesterday told Guingona’s committee how she delivered to
Sen. Jinggoy Estrada’s office
in a wheeled luggage P8 million to P10 million in kickbacks
from an alleged P10-billion
pork barrel scam engineered
by businesswoman Janet LimNapoles.
On questioning by Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, Tuason said
Estrada was in his sixth-floor
office in the Senate building
when she made the payoff,
upon instruction by Napoles,
sometime in 2008. She said
she made cash deliveries to Estrada’s office at least twice and
at other times, to his Greenhills
residence in San Juan City.
“I don’t exactly remember
how much but if it’s that kind
of bag, I would presume it could
be something like 10 million
[pesos]. Perhaps, 8 to 10 (million pesos),” Tuason said, testifying a week after her return
from the United States where
she had fled after the scandal
broke out six months ago.
Tuason, who is facing plunder charges in the Office of the
Ombudsman in connection
with the alleged Napoles racket
and has applied to become a
state witness, said there were
also times that she would give
smaller payoffs, P1 million for
instance, to Estrada.
“That would fit in my bag. Because I carry a huge bag,” Tuason said.
She mentioned that there
was a time she gave money to
Estrada at the Zirkoh comedy
bar in Greenhills. She said Napoles and her husband Jaime
witnessed the turnover.
Aside from details already
www.canadianinquirer.net

Guingona, chair of the Senate blue ribbon committee, said it was the first time
that a witness directly testified kickback money was given to a senator.
PHOTO FROM NEWSHOPPER.SULEKHA.COM

mentioned in her sworn statement submitted to the Department of Justice (DOJ), Tuason said Estrada himself and
Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile’s chief
of staff, lawyer Jessica Lucila
“Gigi” Reyes, offered millions
of pesos in public funds for
Napoles’ network of dubious
nongovernment organizations
(NGOs).
The NGOs were allegedly
used to channel allocations
from the lawmakers’ Priority
Development Assistance Fund
(PDAF) aimed at alleviating
rural poverty to ghost projects
and kickbacks. The racket was
exposed by Benhur Luy, a former Napoles employee.
Recounting accounts of the
transactions detailed in her
15page sworn statement, Tuason said she was met by a member of Estrada’s staff at the Senate’s basement parking area
and accompanied to the elevator and Estrada’s office on the
building’s top floor.
Tuason identified the man as
Alfredo de los Reyes after she
was shown pictures of Estrada’s
staff during the hearing.
“Then I went to the office
of Senator Estrada. I placed it
in his private room, beside his
chair,” Tuason said.
Payoff to Enrile aide

“Was
Estrada
there?”
Trillanes asked.
“Yeah. There was a time when
he wasn’t there because he was
in session. I just waited for him.

But usually he’s there,” Tuason
replied.
She said Estrada knew whenever she would deliver the kickbacks because she would call
him. “I would tell him, I’m coming over to bring it. Then I will
bring it and leave it with him.”
She said she also would tell
Estrada how much money
was in the bag. “I just tell him.
There, for instance, is eight million,” Tuason said.
As to cash deliveries to
Reyes, Tuason said she would
meet Enrile’s senior aide in
posh Makati and Taguig restaurants—Tsukiji, Gourmand,
L’Opera and Mamou.
“Let’s say, for example, I have
the bag. I will come down from
the car to go to the restaurant
and if her driver is there, I will
just give the bag to her driver,”
Tuason said.
Tuason said she would then
tell Reyes how much was delivered. She said she would
also give a piece of paper from
Benhur Luy and the JLN group
about how much money Reyes
would receive.
Asked how she told Reyes
that she was going to give her
money from Napoles, Tuason
said, “She knows that the reason why we were going to see
each other was because I was
going to hand her money.”
Inkling of payoff

Trillanes asked Tuason if she
❱❱ PAGE 13 Guingona: It’s

Philippine News

FEBRUARY 21, 2014 FRIDAY 12

‘Give us back our roads’
SC petitioners fed up with traffic jams, air and noise pollution
BY MARICAR B. BRIZUELA,
AND CHRISTINE O.
AVENDAÑO
Philippine Daily Inquirer
MANILA, PHILIPPINES—A
group of Filipinos, including
children and students, on Monday asked the Supreme Court
to compel the government
to implement a road-sharing
scheme, saying that practically
all the roads in the country are
given to just less than 2 percent
of the population that owns
motor vehicles.
“The 98 percent of Filipinos
are not even given proper space
for them to walk or bike,” the
group said.
It is demanding that half of
the roads be set aside for nonmotorized transportation, safe
and covered sidewalks, edible
gardens and all-weather bike
lanes, and the other half for an
organized transport system.
Valerie Cruz, one of the convenors of the Share the Road
Movement, said the group was
also asking the high court to
reduce the gas allowance of
Cabinet officials and to require
them to take public transport.
Cruz said this was the only
way for officials to understand
the experience of a daily commuter taking public transport.
Carless residents and car
owners alike walked for 30
minutes from Rizal Park to the
Supreme Court building in Manila to ask for the issuance of a
writ of kalikasan. Others rode
bikes.
A writ of kalikasan is a legal
remedy for parties who believe
that their “constitutional right
to a balanced and healthful ecology is violated or threatened
with violation.” Its issuance
leads to protection orders and
mandates court hearings on environment and health matters.
“All (petitioners) stand to be
injured by respondents’ unlawful neglect of the principle that
those who have less in wheels
must have more in the road
(road-sharing principle) as directed by law,” said the petition,
which held as respondents several government agencies and
President Aquino, chair of the
Climate Change Commission.
Four-year-old girl

Four-year-old Maria Paulina

Voiding RH law not
what people want–
Belmonte
BY LEILA B. SALAVERRIA
Philippine Daily Inquirer

24 petitions were filed in various barangays from Luzon, Vizayas and Mindanao
last 2013 by the Share the Road Movement.
PHOTO FROM SHARE THE ROAD MOVEMENT FACEBOOK PAGE

Castañeda, a daughter of a participant in the “Walk for WoK
(writ of kalikasan),” handed
the copy of the petition to the
docket section of the Supreme
Court.
Castañeda was assisted by
80-year-old Commissioner Elsie de Veyra of the Philippine
Commission on Women, who
said that she attended the event
to represent the elderly.
The petitioners asked the
high court to require the government to implement certain
environmental laws “to mitigate the ill effects of the crisis of
climate change, reduce air pollution and improve air quality
by adopting the road-sharing
principle.”
The environmental laws include Administrative Order No.
171, which created the Presidential Task Force on Climate
Change; Executive Order No.
774, which reorganized the
Presidential Task force on Climate Change; Administrative
Order No. 254, which mandates
the Department of Transportation and Communication
(DOTC) to formulate a national
environmentally sustainable
transport for the Philippines;
and Republic Act No. 9729,
which established the framework strategy and program on
climate change, and created the
Climate Change Commission.
The petitioners said the government had been building
more and more roads to accommodate more and more private
vehicles.
“This car-centric transportation policy is the result of
the Philippines trying to ape
the transportation model of

Los Angeles, a model we see in
American movies,” they said.
They noted that the proliferation of private cars and vehicles has poisoned the air and
that the government has failed
to implement environment
laws.
Prayer

The petitioners asked the
court to direct the DOTC, Department of Public Works and
Highways and Department of
the Interior and Local Government to immediately implement the road-sharing principle by, among other ways:
– Dividing all the roads by at
least one half, lengthwise. Onehalf of the road shall be used
for all-weather sidewalks and
bicycle lanes as well as for urban edible gardens pursuant to
Section 12b of Executive Order
No. 774.
The other half of the road
space may be used for motorized vehicles, preferably for
safe, efficient, convenient and
inexpensive collective or mass
Filipino-made transportation
systems.
– For the Department of Budget and Management to make
available funds for the roadsharing principle.
– For the executive branch
to reduce its fuel consumption
by 50 percent starting from the
date the case was filed, and for
employees and officials to take
public transportation for 50
percent of the time.
Those who joined the Walk
for WoK included some 80 law
students from Ateneo de Ma❱❱ PAGE 39 ‘Give us’

www.canadianinquirer.net

A SUPREME Court decision
to strike down the reproductive health (RH) law would go
against what the people want,
Speaker Feliciano Belmonte
warned.
Voiding the law, whose approval was won in a narrow
Congress vote, would be a “veto
against the will of the majority
of our people,” Belmonte said.
The Speaker of the House
was reacting to talk the petitioners who challenged the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Law in the
high tribunal might just win
their case.
Congress approved the bill in
December 2012 after a bitterly
fought battle marked by namecalling and accusations of lobbying by both proponents and
opponents.
“While I fully respect the
integrity, impartiality and independence of the Supreme
Court, we must also consider
that the passage of this law took
13 years and about four months.
It was realized despite pressure
from religious groups and other
sectors who worked just as hard
to raise their issues against the
measure,” Belmonte said in a
statement.
He said the arguments raised
against the law were well-ventilated during the congressional
debates among the representatives.
“Remember that we have 289
House members who are individuals representing a broad
spectrum of society,”
he said.
“They
are rep-

resentatives directly elected
to articulate what majority of
their constituents want. Therefore the resulting law was a
product of this painstaking process and was a democratic compromise,” he said.
The Speaker described the
opinions of the RH law’s opponents as the “minority view,”
since the measure was passed
despite their opposition being
taken up by the lawmakers.
“We must therefore respect
the desire of the majority which
is to exercise their freedom of
choice,” he said.
He also disputed claims that
the law promoted abortion,
pointing out that the measure
declared abortion illegal.
“It is in fact a law that ends
the paternalistic treatment of
women and is supportive of
their right to choose. It is a law
that may even greatly reduce, if
not eradicate, the tens of thousands of illegal abortions that
are going on yearly in the country today, further endangering
the lives of women and mercilessly killing their unborn children,” he said.
Belmonte said Congress took
all views into consideration
when it voted on the measure,
and it was its duty to safeguard
the people’s legal rights.
“The Constitution guarantees individuals in a democracy
this legal right to choose for
themselves, including how they
perceive their roles as responsible parents and the methods
they would choose to sustain
their reproductive health,” he
said. ■

Philippine News

13 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Jinggoy Estrada...
Ombudsman in connection with the pork
barrel scandal that
has sparked widespread public condemnation. All of them
have denied wrongdoing.
A former social secretary of
former President Joseph Estrada, Tuason testified before the
blue ribbon committee that she
delivered kickbacks to Senator
Estrada in his Senate office, a
comedy bar and in his home in
Greenhills, San Juan City.
The 62-year-old Tuason is
also facing plunder charges. She
went to the United States after
the scandal broke out in July
2013 and returned on Feb. 7,
saying she wanted to turn state
witness because her conscience
bothered her. She offered to
return P40 million in commissions she said she received
while working for Napoles.
Estrada vehemently denied
Tuason’s allegations, saying “Tita
Ruby” delivered trays of sandwiches and not bags of peso bills.
❰❰ 8

‘I’ve been demonized’

On the floor on Monday, Estrada said Tuason’s testimony was
“empty,” as he assailed Guingona
for prejudging the hearing.
“I’ve been demonized in the
newspapers. We kept on hogging the headlines almost every
day… that there was a new whistle-blower who was going to pin
me down. But in truth and in
fact, her testimony was empty,”
he said.

“I don’t want to discuss the
details… but I feel so hurt by the
parting statements made by the
chair of the blue ribbon committee. If he chooses that battle,
I will give him that battle. No
problem with me. We’re all colleagues here. But to prejudge
me as guilty, I will not allow that.
I will fight that. I have not committed any crime against the
Filipino people,” he said.
Former President Estrada,
who is now Manila mayor, Enrile, Revilla and other opposition senators turned up in the
younger Estrada’s office to celebrate his birthday.
The elder Estrada wished
that his son, Enrile and Revilla
would “overcome” the scandal.
“It’s a vicious cycle. They’re
conditioning the minds of the
people… that they’re guilty,” he
told reporters in his son’s office,
which was packed with guests.
“That’s what they did to me
when I was impeached.”
The former President, who
was toppled by a people’s revolt
in 2001 over charges of corruption, incompetence and inefficiency, and later convicted of
plunder, acknowledged that the
controversy was affecting his
son’s political plans.
“Once he’s cleared, he’ll become more popular,” he said.
‘Stop persecution’
While the elder Estrada was
under “house arrest” during his
trial for plunder, Jinggoy and
his mother, Luisa “Loi” Ejerci-

to, ran for and won seats in the
Senate. After he was convicted,
Joseph Estrada was pardoned
by then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Senator Estrada, for his part,
aired this birthday wish: “Stop
the persecution.”
The senator admitted that
he missed Tuason, the food coordinator in his 50th birthday
party.
“She used to be in charge of
food. Now I had to do it myself,”
Estrada said before playing
host to reporters at lunch in the
Senate press office.
As social secretary to the elder
Estrada, Tuason was in charge
of state dinners in Malacañang
and apparently also handled
special family occasions.
All those good, happy times
between the Estradas and Tuason are over now. Days after
flying home from the United
States, Tuason took to the witness stand and said she delivered bags of money to Estrada
as well as to Enrile’s chief of
staff, Jessica Lucila “Gigi”
Reyes, in restaurants.
Enrile, for his part, challenged Senators Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Antonio
Trillanes IV to act as “private
prosecutors” against him.

P30 million and ask what they
intend to do with it,” Tuason
said.

added.
Tuason was the former social
secretary of Estrada’s father,
former President and now Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada,
when he was still in Malacañang. Jinggoy Estrada himself
acknowledged that Tuason was
a family friend.
At one point, Trillanes said
he found Tuason’s affidavit
wanting and Sen. Miriam DefensorSantiago observed that
the witness was “trying to tread
on as few toes as possible.”
“You’re a smart, sophisticated woman. You know more
than this,” Trillanes said. The
DOJ, he said, should get more
information from her if she is
to become a state witness.

Dare to Santiago, Trillanes

Santiago said Enrile’s presence in Tuason’s meetings with
Reyes showed his complicity in the alleged crime while

Senator Jinggoy Estrada.
PHOTO FROM PHILIPPINENEWS.COM

Trillanes insinuated a “possible
sabotage” of the case against
Enrile resulting from Tuason’s
testimony.
Trillanes said he would produce documents showing the
connection between Tuason’s
lawyer, Dennis Manalo, and Enrile. Manalo said he was no longer connected with the Siguion
Reyna, Montecillo & Ongsiako
law firm in which Enrile was a
partner. Enrile said he severed
his ties with the firm in 1965.
“I wish that they would appear as private prosecutors,”

Enrile, who turned 90 on Feb.
14, said, referring to his colleagues who were linking him
to the scam. “We will welcome
them as witnesses or private
prosecutors.”
The
Volunteers
Against
Crime and Corruption (VACC)
in a statement on Monday called
on Estrada to resign. Dante
Jimenez, VACC president, said:
“It was very clear in Ms. Tuason’s testimony that she delivered millions of pesos in kickbacks to his Senate office and his
residence in San Juan.” ■

son a “perfect witness” for the
prosecution.
Santiago suggested a reason
for Tuason’s hesitation: Her
friend Alice Eduardo was Enrile’s business partner in the
Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (Ceza).
“Senator Enrile is using a
common friend for his scam in
the Ceza. She and Alice Eduardo are close friends, and she
didn’t want to embarrass her
friend,” she later told reporters.
Eduardo, president and
CEO of Sta. Elena Construction & Development Corp. who
has close ties to Reyes, had
been awarded the contract for
the 1,000-meter, P5.1-billion
breakwater project under the
Port Irene rehabilitation and
development program.

Eduardo is president of Sta.
Fe Builders Dredging & Equipment Corp., whose chair, Neal
Jose O. Gonzales, is the brother
of Reyes.
But the mere fact that Enrile
would pick up Reyes during her
meetings with Tuason showed
he was “complicit in the conspiracy,” Santiago said.
Otherwise, Santiago said Tuason was an “eyewitness” to the
scam, and met all the requirements to be a state witness. Tuason’s testimony, she said, was
“sufficient” to convict the key
players in the scandal beyond
reasonable doubt.
“Here we have a person who
personally dealt with some of
the accused here, particularly
the senators involved,” she said.
If at all, she said Tuason was a
mere “gofer.” ■

Guingona: It’s...
believed Enrile knew
Reyes was collecting
kickbacks from the
senator’s PDAF disbursements.
“He never even mentioned the
word PDAF to me,” Tuason said.
“Considering how many these
transactions were, maybe he had
an inkling.” Pressed for a categorical answer, she said, “I can
only presume that he knows.”
Trillanes told Tuason that
the public was watching if she
would cover up for anybody
after she decided to become a
state witness and come under
the DOJ’s witness protection
program. She said she only entered the deals “at the start and
at the end and when there were
payments to be made.”
“So, when they tell me that
they have P30 million, I call
Benhur to tell him they have
❰❰ 11

Smart woman

Asked by Trillanes who in
Estrada’s and Enrile’s offices
called her to inform her of the
availability of funds for conversion into fat kickbacks by Napoles’ NGOs, Tuason said, “In
the office of Senator Enrile it
was Attorney Gigi and or sometimes it was... Mr. Evangelista.”
Tuason was referring to Jose
Antonio Evangelista, the deputy chief of staff in Enrile’s office.
Evangelista, along with Enrile,
Estrada and Reyes, was in the
first batch of those named in
the plunder complaint.
“In the office of Senator Estrada it was Senator Estrada.
We’re rather close,” Tuason

awarded the project and get
paid upon the issuance of the
NCA.
Operations in Congress

AKLAN REP. Teodorico Haresco Jr., the driver of Budget
Undersecretary Mario Relampagos and three others were behind the fake special allotment
release order (Saro) scam, according to the National Bureau
of Investigation, which recommended the filing of criminal
charges against them.
A Saro is a document issued
by the Department of Budget
and Management (DBM) that
allows the release of lump-sum
funds, such as those from a senator’s or a congressman’s pork
barrel, officially known as the
Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).
The release of a Saro paves the
way for the issuance of a notice
of cash allocation (NCA), which
in turn triggers the release of
the funds. (The Supreme Court
declared the PDAF unconstitutional last December.)
Relampagos, who was also
investigated by the NBI for possible involvement in the fake
Saro scam, was not among those
recommended to be charged in
the NBI’s Jan. 29 report to Justice Secretary Leila de Lima.
The report was released to the
media.
De Lima said there was “no
evidence or sufficient evidence
yet” against Relampagos.
Syndicate in DBM

“That’s why the (NBI) team
also recommends further investigation with the end view of
identifying others who may be
part of a well-entrenched syndicate engaged in Saro peddling
and similar insidious schemes,”
the justice secretary said in a
text message to reporters.
Budget Secretary Florencio
Abad vowed to “take appropriate action” against his personnel implicated in the case.
But Abad said his agency
would first “need to thoroughly
review the [NBI] report and determine the culpability/extent
of involvement of DBM personnel in the so-called Saro scam.”
Communications Secretary
Herminio Coloma said the NBI
findings were “part of our continuing effort to curb corruption and establish higher standards of public accountability.”

The National Bureau of Investigation recommends the filing of criminal charges
against Aklan Rep. Teodorico Haresco Jr., the driver of Budget Undersecretary
Mario Relampagos and three others who were allegedly behind the fake special
allotment release order scam.
PHOTO FROM INQUIRER.NET FILE PHOTO

“Those who persist in carrying out decadent practices in
the bureaucracy are served notice to shape up or ship out,” he
told reporters.

which were peddled to certain
congressional staff members.
The probe was conducted at the
request of the DBM.
Falsification

Findings challenged

Haresco challenged the NBI
findings that he was criminally
liable for a fake Saro, saying that
he or his office has no capability to produce such a document
and that he would have no use
for a bogus order anyway.
He said he was “flabbergasted” by the NBI’s findings, especially since his staff had acted
as complainants in the NBI in
connection with the spurious
documents.
Haresco said the NBI should
reinvestigate the matter even
as he disclosed that he had received another Saro last month
which concerned the same
project covered by the fake
Saro, although this time, the
latest document was confirmed
to be original.
“I’m asking the NBI to reinvestigate because how can
it be that my office can be an
originator of fake Saros when
we have no capability at all. We
don’t know how the Saro document [is produced]. We have
an idea but we don’t know the
code number, the signatories,
the serial number or bar code,”
Haresco said in a press briefing.
He said a fake Saro would
serve no purpose for him.
“What will it benefit me if I have
an advance notice? What will I
get out of it except to announce
[it] prior to the construction of
the project?”
De Lima said the NBI report
focused on the agency’s investigation of two fake Saros for
Region 2 (Cagayan Valley) and
Region 6 (Eastern Visayas),

Besides Haresco, recommended to be charged in the
Department of Justice were
Emmanuel Raza, a staff member of Zamboanga City Rep.
Lilia Macrohon-Nuno; Elvie
Rafael, driver of Relampagos;
Bhernie Beltran, an alleged
DBM employee; and Mary Ann
Castillo, a consultant of Haresco.
Except for Castillo, the rest
were recommended to be
charged with falsification of
public documents. Castillo was
recommended to be charged
with obstruction of justice.
Raza, Rafael and Beltran
were also recommended to be
charged with violation of the
Anti- Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, and the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for
Public Officials and Employees.
Rafael was recommended to be
administratively charged with
grave misconduct.
Modus operandi

The Saro gang’s modus operandi is to photocopy advance
copies of the Saros and turn
them over to their contacts in
the congressional offices where
signatures are superimposed
to make the documents appear
genuine.
The congressional contact
then shows the copy of the Saro
to the local executive where
the project is located. The local
executive then shows the fake
Saro to a contractor who will
then advance at least 20 percent of the project cost.
The contractor will then be
www.canadianinquirer.net

In the course of its investigation, the NBI unearthed
the involvement of a “well-entrenched syndicate” within the
DBM, the operations of which
extend to the halls of Congress,
De Lima said.
“(S)ome DBM employees,
who requested anonymity,
hinted [at] the involvement of
some other employees and a
highranking official in Saro
peddling,” she quoted the report as saying.
“Hence, further and deeper
investigation is warranted,” the
justice secretary said.
The NBI investigated Relampagos after a janitor and a driver in his office were said to be
members of the Saro gang.
The investigation covered
Saros issued in Cagayan Valley
worth P161 million and in Western Visayas worth P77 million.
Farm-to-market projects

When the scam was uncovered in October last year, the
DBM quickly canceled 12 Saros
covering P875 million worth of
farm-to-market projects, the
funds forwhich had yet to be released. The Saros also had not
been signed by the authorized
signatory, then Assistant Secretary Luz Cantor.
The NBI report said that according to Relampagos’ affidavit, the budget undersecretary
did not recommend the request
for the release of funds on the
farm-to-market-roads of the
Department of Agriculture in
October last year because it
lacked a network plan.
But copies of unreleased and
unsigned Saros for the farm-tomarket road projects surfaced
in mid-October last year when
inquiries into these were made
at the DA regional field office in
Tuguegarao City.
Raza was implicated after it
was found out that he had given
a copy of a fake Saro and its attachments to a staff member of
Rep. Aline Vargas-Alonso.
Raza told probers he had gotten a folder containing a photocopy of the listing of farmtomarket road projects from
Rafael, a Relampagos driver,
and Beltran, a DBM employee.
Both men offered no evidence
to refute Raza’s claims.

Haresco letter

Haresco was implicated because he sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala
on Oct. 21, 2013, to which a Saro
that was determined to be fake
was attached. The document
was among a series of Saro that
the DBM had canceled.
Because of this, the NBI team
said that “the legal presumption that the person who presented a falsified document is
deemed to be the author, if he
stands to benefit there from
arises.”
“The requirement of gain or
benefit was satisfied because
Cong[ ressman] Haresco Jr.,
would surely take the credit if
the project mentioned in the
Saro would be implemented
considering that his district
was its beneficiary,” the report
said.
Haresco consultant

It was discovered that the
fake Saro was endorsed by
Haresco’s consultant, Castillo, who claimed it came from
someone she was not familiar
with. But investigators said
Castillo had hesitated to provide more information about
the person who gave the fake
Saro to her.
She left her job after her contract ended last Dec. 31. She
gave a notarized affidavit instead of being interviewed by
the NBI.
All this prompted the NBI
team to conclude that she did
not want to identify the source
of the Saro and to cooperate
with the probers.
The NBI team said the premature disclosure and/or unauthorized release of the Saro
was due to a lack of internal
control system in the DBM.
This lack of control led to the
printing of Saros despite deficiency in the documentary requirements, especially the network plan; improper handling
of documents; and improper
use of non-DBM employees in
the delivery of documents.
Because of the scam, the
DBM announced in early January the scrapping of the Saro
system.
Abad said departments and
agencies would no longer need
to get Saros to obligate funds
because the General Appropriations Act had become the
government’s “official budget
release document.” ■

Philippine News

15 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Over 3 days, thousands of US
volunteers pack 2 million meals
for hungry children overseas
BY MIKE HOUSEHOLDER
The Associated Press
NOVI, MICH.—They came from
all walks of life—Girl Scouts
troops, National Guard
units, financial planning
offices—to
spend
three days packing food for
thousands of
hungry children they’ll
never meet.
The 2 Million Meals
effort,
the
brainchild of
a Detroit-area
pastor, concluded Sunday.
The results:
8,810 volunteers
put
together
2,029,536 meals
to be shipped to
El Salvador, Haiti
and the Philippines. The mixtures
of rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and
21 vitamins and minerals will provide
one meal a day for a year to 5,560 children.
“The truth is, this has been an amazing experience because of the impact it’s
going to cause in the lives of every child
and every person who’s going to eat
these meals,” Brad Powell, who heads up
NorthRidge Church, said shortly after
the 2 millionth meal was packed Sunday
afternoon. “But I think you can see from
the energy in this room and all that’s going on it’s going to change more than just
the lives of those who will eat this food.”
Powell led an effort three years ago
in which 5,000 volunteers packed 1 million meals over the same time period
at an area middle school. Convinced
more could and should be done, Powell
dreamed of doubling that effort.
That vision became a reality on Sunday, when the magic completed number was displayed on an oversized video
display. Volunteers, who worked 11 sets
of two-hour shifts from Friday to Sunday, cheered and danced as Gary Glitter’s sports-arena anthem “Rock & Roll,
Part 2” filled the Suburban Collection
Showplace, a convention centre in Novi,
which donated 65,000 square feet (6,000
sq. meters) of space.
Also on board was Feed My Starving
Children, a Minnesota non-profit that
sends volunteer-packed meals across

the globe.
NorthRidge members paid for the
meals themselves, raising $440,000
mostly through Christmas offerings at
the church, which is one of the largest
in the U.S. The nondenominational Christian church,
which has
its main
campus in
Plymouth
Township
as
well
as
two
satellite
locations
e l s e where in
Michig a n ,
draws an
average of
9,600 worshippers
each weekend.
Packing
stations
such as Jenna’s cheered when they reached a certain number of meals. The hooting and
hollering could be heard, barely, over
the nonstop barrage of music—an eclectic mix of Christian rock, Motown, modern pop and more.
Occasionally, organizers gave the volunteers a much-needed break.
On Sunday, the volunteers dropped
their tape, scissors, labels and ladles and
broke into the “Cupid Shuffle” dance en
masse.
Gabe Solak, a 12-year-old from Ypsilanti, said he was drawn by the chance to
do something for someone else.
“I heard about all these kids who were
starving and are hungry, and I wanted to
help them,” he said. “I’m very compassionate.”
Sgt. Stacy Price, 43, worked alongside
a handful of his fellow soldiers from
a nearby Army National Guard unit,
which saw 2 Million Meals as both a
chance to give back as well as a valuable
team-building exercise.
Price, though, said it was simply an
enjoyable experience.
“I got to meet some amazing people
here. Hopefully, I’ve met some more
friends,” said the fatigues-clad Price,
who posed for more than a few pictures
with other volunteers. “The experience
was great. The people were very upbeat.
Everyone was smiling and having a good
time.” ■

Remittances hit...
OFWs remains supportive of
economic activity, with cash
remittances accounting for 8.4
percent of the country’s gross domestic
product in 2013,” the BSP said in a statement.
Cash remittances in December rose
by 9.1 percent year-on-year to a record
$2.2 billion. This brought the full-year
figure to $22.8 billion—also the highest
on record for any 12-month period—
representing an increase of 6.4 percent
from the previous year.
The expansion in 2013 was better than
the 5-percent growth projected by the
BSP at the start of the year.
These cash transfers from OFWs are
the biggest source of foreign exchange
for the country, ensuring the ample supply of dollars and other currencies that
the economy needs for doing business
with the rest of the world.
Remittances are also the major driver
of domestic consumption, which makes
up about two-thirds of GDP. The country’s economy as measured by GDP grew
by 7.2 percent in 2013, beating government estimates and the second highest
in Asia after China’s.
Late last year, BSP officials said remittances would grow more than expected
❰❰ 1

www.canadianinquirer.net

as OFWs with families in areas affected
by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” send more
money to finance the reconstruction of
homes.
In its statement, the BSP boasted that
more than three-fourths or 77.1 percent
of all remittances in December came
from land-based workers with contracts
of one year or more—an indication of
the sustainability of the flows.
Cash transfers from sea-based
workers rose at a faster rate of 7.9 percent versus 6 percent for land-based
OFWs.
The major sources of remittances
were the United States, Saudi Arabia,
United Kingdom , United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Canada and Japan.
Apart from the sustained demand for
Filipino labor, the BSP said the ever-expanding global presence of local banks
and other financial institutions through
the establishment of new offices or tieups with foreign partners has made it
easier for OFWs to send money home
safely.
As of end-December, commercial
banks’ tie-ups, remittance centers and
correspondent bank branches and representative offices in other countries
stood at 4,740 locations. ■

Opinion

FEBRUARY 21, 2014 FRIDAY 16

THERE’S THE RUB

Post-Valentine, of sorts
By Conrado De Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
THIS COUNTRY is home to sublime
ironies, and none comes more sublime
than the fall of Juan Ponce Enrile.
Only a year and a half ago, he was
at the height of his powers and popularity. He had just presided over the
impeachment trial of Renato Corona
and had done so masterfully, unfurling his lawyerly skills for all the world
to see. Armed with that triumph, he
unfurled as well his recollection of
his life and times for all the world to
cringe. Insisting among others that
his waylaying at Wack-Wack, which
triggered martial law, was the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth, so help him God.
God did not. His unraveling was as
swift as his raveling. A year and a half
later, he had lost his commanding
heights and was looking at the world
from the bottom of the abyss. He was
one of three senators charged with
conspiring with Janet Napoles to
defraud the public big-time, and the
senators he had pissed off during his
heyday were determined to see him
bite the dust. They had their knives
unsheathed last Thursday, and two of
them in particular, Antonio Trillanes
and Miriam Defensor-Santiago,

brandished newly sharpened ones.
They were unhappy with the way
Ruby Tuason had dealt with him. “She
was rather clear in the part about Sen.
Jinggoy Estrada,” lamented Trillanes.
“But when it came to the part about
Senator Enrile, she suddenly became
forgetful. It was as if she wasn’t interested.” Santiago echoed the sentiment
suggesting that Tuason knew more
than what she told about Enrile. Their
complaint drew from the fact that Tuason had testified only about dealing
with the keeper of Enrile’s house and
heart, Gigi Reyes, and not with Enrile
himself. When they asked whether she
knew if Enrile gave her his blessings
and profited from the transactions,
Tuason said no. She left it to the senators to draw their own conclusions.
That left Trillanes and Santiago instead unsatisfied and demanding she
say more. But why on earth should
she, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima
asked? In fact, De Lima went on, that
was what made Tuason’s testimony
rock-solid, she spoke only about
things she knew. The natural assumption that Reyes was merely Enrile’s
alter ego, to say the least, might be
acceptable in the court of public opinion, but it was not in a court of law. In
a court of law, that will not be taken as
proof, that will be taken as perjury.

But—and here’s the part that
makes this a sublime irony, and a
post-Valentine story of sorts—I don’t
know that Tuason has really done
Enrile a world of favor by pinning
down only Reyes with her testimony.
I don’t know that she hasn’t in fact
twisted the knife after plunging it
into his, well, heart.
Look at the wonder of it: Here is
a man who, now about to embark on
his 10th decade on earth, has managed to survive pretty much every

The
guy
looked
invincible. He had no
known vulnerabilities, not
conscience, not scruples,
not compunction.
adversity, springing back from them
with the ease of a jack-in-the-box.
Among them his ( junior) partnership with Marcos, a partnership he
cemented with his aforesaid ambush
at Wack Wack, whose authenticity he
has always been of two minds about.
Among them as well his thwarted attempts to oust Cory by various coups,
seeing his comrades jailed for their
pains and for his ambitions (he himself escaped the fate), but rising back
again to recover fame and fortune.

The guy looked invincible. He had no
known vulnerabilities, not conscience,
not scruples, not compunction. Even
when he went on a downhill slide soon
after launching his book—he was accused of giving his favorite senators
millions in taxpayer money in the form
of Christmas bonuses, he was accused
of turning the Cagayan Special Economic Zone and Freeport into a smuggler’s paradise, his son lost in the elections after WikiLeaks reminded the
world of his murder case—he seemed
battered but unbowed. Indeed, even
after being tagged as one of the senators in cahoots with Napoles, he looked
headed to shrug it off all over again.
Except, this time, for one thing.
Ruby Tuason has given direct evidence
not about him but about Gigi Reyes.
Ruby Tuason has unfurled the specter
of jail not on him but on Gigi Reyes.
I remember again that scene in
“Casablanca” where Humphrey Bogart
tells Claude Rains, “This gun is pointed
right at your heart,” to which Rains
replies: “That is my least vulnerable
spot.” As it turns out with Enrile, in his
twilight years that is his most.
Contrary to Trillanes’ and Santiago’s
interpretation that Tuason has spared
Enrile, she has in fact put him in a bind.
True enough, Tuason has given him
a loophole. She hasn’t named him di-

rectly as a party to the transactions. Of
course she knows how to add two and
two together, as Trillanes and Santiago
bid her do in front of them, but the law
forbids her from doing so. She does not
know it for a fact, she knows it only for
an assumption. Legally—and Enrile,
like Marcos, has always found in the
legal the most formidable protection,
apart from the most lethal weapon—
Enrile can always say he had nothing to
do with Reyes’ doings. Legally, he can
always say what Reyes did is her own
lookout. Legally, he can always hang
her out to dry.
Or he can bail her out and, at risk of
his own wellbeing, and freedom, admit
freely that all Reyes has done she has
done for him. It won’t do to just try to
discredit Tuason by calling her a liar to
her face, his capacity to call anyone a
liar, like Jinggoy’s, particularly after his
autobiography, not being there, never
mind Tuason’s own credibility.
So, what’s it going to be? Will he be
playing a role in the movie, “Hanggang Dito Na Lamang at Maraming
Salamat,” or “Sa Dulo ng Walang
Hanggan”? Will he be singing the
line from Frank Sinatra’s song, “It’s
Over,” “The loving was easy, it’s the
living that’s hard”?
Or the song from “Chorus Line,”
“What I Did For Love”? ■

AS I SEE IT

Promote alternative means of transportation
By Randy David
Philippine Daily Inquirer
WE ARE glad to read in Sunday’s Inquirer that the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) will revive
the Pasig River ferry as suggested in a
recent column. As it will supply a new
fleet of boats, the MMDA should make
sure that the cabins are closed and airconditioned so that passengers will
not smell the stink of the river. It was
this stink that, in the past, discouraged
commuters from taking the ferry. So
the new boats should be shallow draft
so that they will not touch the bottom
of the now shallow Pasig River. I rode
many times in such a type of ferryboats at the Disney World in Orlando,
Florida. Maybe MMDA Chair Francis
Tolentino can send somebody, or go
there himself, to take a look.
Another factor that discouraged
commuters from taking the ferry was
the long wait at the river terminals,
so there should be enough boats for
more frequent trips. While the boat
trip itself was short, the long wait at
the terminals made the passengers
lose precious time.
The ferry won’t make much money
at first—maybe even lose some—but
the number of passengers will increase
as commuters discover the fast, com-

fortable, cool trip up and down the Pasig River a much better alternative to
riding in crowded buses and jeepneys
crawling through traffic jams on land.
For added comfort, the ferry can sell
soft drinks and snacks on board.
On weekends, the ferry may extend
its service to the lakeshore towns
around Laguna Lake for holiday
trippers. Better access to them will
hasten the development of the lakeshore towns which are isolated most
of the time in spite of their closeness
to Metro Manila. Restaurants serving fish caught in the lake and other
Rizal-Laguna delicacies will sprout.
Soon souvenir shops selling, for instance, woodcarvings from Paete and
lanzones during the lanzones season
will follow. Los Baños has its famous
buko pie and fresh carabao milk.
We used to drive around the lakeshore towns of Rizal to visit the old
churches and eat kanduli, hito, plapla, and “usa” and “baboy damo”—although I know that hardly any deer or
wild pigs can now be caught in the surrounding hills. What they are serving
now are probably beef and pork from
native black pigs. But no matter, the
trips will still be enjoyable because of
the beautiful, rustic countryside.
That’s another thing: Metro Manilans, trapped in the concrete jun-

gle, long for the rustic countryside
with the open space, wide fields, and
bamboo-and-nipa houses. But they
are fast disappearing in the BulacanPampanga towns and in the LagunaCavite-Batangas towns traversed by
the NLEx and SLEx, respectively.
You see the fields as you speed along
the highways, but you can’t get down
there. When you stop in the towns,
you are met by a concrete jungle similar to the one you fled from.
We also used to ride the ManilaCavite ferry—when it was still operat-

“...[B]ut the number of
passengers will increase
as commuters discover the
fast, comfortable, cool trip
up and down the Pasig River
a much better alternative to
riding in crowded buses and
jeepneys...”
ing—in the late afternoon or early evening just to savor fresh sea breeze while
having ice-cold beer on board, and to
look around Cavite City. We would take
the same ferry on its trip back to Manila.
That ferry also ceased operations
because of financial losses. But the
government should revive and subsidize it because it would take a big
load off the crowded Manila-Cavite

www.canadianinquirer.net

highway—at least until MRT 3 is
completed and goes operational.
In fact, traffic congestion to and
from the towns along Manila Bay
would ease if there were ferry services
to these towns. For the same reason,
traffic on MacArthur Highway would
lessen if ferry services were made
available to transport passengers between Bulacan-Pampanga and Metro
Manila. Our old folk used the river and
the sea to ship cargo and people from
these provinces to Manila and its suburbs. Flat-bottomed boats called “casco” were poled down the river with
loads of rice, salt, nipa shingles, bamboo and other products. Residents of
river towns waited on the riverbanks
to buy the goods from them.
We should continue to use our waterways to ease the traffic load on our
few and narrow roads. We are an archipelago and we should use the water highways which need no periodic
repairs like the streets. What’s more,
because the sea is so big, there would
be no traffic congestion on it as happens on land.
For this reason, the government
should encourage a boatbuildingand-repairing industry. Most of the
boats we have now are small they
could easily sink in rough seas. Provide boat builders with the knowhow

and capital to build bigger boats.
Together with the ferryboats, we
should increase the number of commuter trains around Metro Manila and
suburbs. Let the Philippine National
Railways earn more so it can improve
the Luzon train system. In other countries, the railroad is the most important
and cheapest means of transportation.
We have neglected our railroad because
we were seduced by the American car
manufacturers to put our money in
motor vehicles. Now we are reaping the
whirlwind of that mistake.
Until the administration of President Diosdado Macapagal, the railroad
operated efficiently from San Fernando, La Union, in the north to Legazpi,
Albay, in the south. The Bicol Express,
which took you in first-class coaches
overnight from Manila to Legazpi, was
famous then. When you woke up in the
morning, Mayon Volcano greeted you
through the train windows.
The trip to Pangasinan, Baguio and
the Ilocos provinces was also fast and
pleasant on board the train. It stopped
at Damortis, La Union, where firstclass buses were waiting to take passengers up Kennon Road to Baguio.
Now a car trip to Baguio takes at
least five hours (it took only four hours
or less in the old days). After you leave
NLEx, the traffic jams begin. ■

Opinion

17 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

VIEWPOINT

Clones?
By Juan L. Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer
“DON’T CRY For Me Argentina” is a
song from a 1978 Broadway musical.
Evita Peron sang this from the Casa
Rosada balcony, expressing regrets
and defiance. “No llores por mi Argentina/ The truth is I never left you
/ All through my wild days / My mad
existence/ I kept my promise….”
Few remember that the Marcos dictatorship banned that song. Officials of
the Cultural Center of the Philippines
were told the play “Evita” was verboten. Uneasy censors thought Imelda
Marcos’ life cloned that of Evita.
“The parable of Argentina offers
lessons for many governments,” The
Economist said this week. “A country
of the future got stuck in the past…
The country’s 100 years of decline
taught that good government matters.” Has this lesson been learned?
Yet, “a century ago, Argentina stood
out as the country of the future.” Its
GDP per head was higher than that of
Germany. The country had fertile land
and benign climate. It introduced universal male suffrage in 1912—ahead
of the Philippines in 1935. “(It also
had) an educated population and the
world’s most erotic dance. Immigrants tangoed in from everywhere….”

Now, the country is a wreck. Argentina is at the center of an emergingmarket crisis—again. “President Cristina Fernandez is merely the latest in
a succession of economically illiterate
populists, stretching back to Juan and
Eva (Evita) Peron, and before.”
Forget about competing with the
Germans. The Chileans and Uruguayans, whom Argentines looked
down on, are now richer. Children
from Brazil and Mexico do better in
international education tests. (In the
early 1970s, the Philippines was second only to Japan in economic performance. By the time the Marcoses
scrammed to escape People Power
crowds, the country had been gutted
to Asean’s pauper status.)
“The danger today is not totalitarianism,” The Economist wrote: “If Indonesia were to boil over, its citizens would
hardly turn to North Korea as a model.”
(Hear that, National Democratic Front’s
Joma Sison and Luis Jalandoni? From
the bourgeois comfort of Holland, they
threaten to wage people’s war here.)
So, where is the danger? That of
“inadvertently becoming the Argentina of the 21st century. Slipping casually into steady decline is
not hard. Weak institutions, nativist
politicians, lazy dependence on a few
assets and a persistent refusal to con-

front reality will do the trick.”
The economic crunch of the early
2000s left Argentines permanently
suspicious of liberal reform. But its
“decline has been largely self-inflicted.
The Perons built a closed economy
that protected its inefficient industries
that Chile’s generals opened up in the
1970s and pulled ahead. Argentina’s
protectionism undermined Mercosur,
the local trade pact.” Fernandez’s government does not just impose tariffs

Few remember that the
Marcos dictatorship banned
that song. Officials of the CCP
were told the play “Evita”
was verboten. Uneasy censors
thought Imelda Marcos’ life
cloned that of Evita.
on imports. It shoots itself in the foot—
by taxing farm exports.
Argentina did not build institutions
to protect its democracy from the
army, (Remember our Rolex 12? Juan
Ponce Enrile, Eduardo Cojuangco,
plus 10 generals, got Rolexes from the
dictator for imposing martial law.) So,
Argentina became prone to coups.
Unlike Australia, Argentina did not
develop strong political parties determined to build and share wealth. Its
politics was captured by the Perons and

focused on personalities and influence.
(Isn’t that a mirror image of the Philippines? In a study of the elites, over two
decades, political scientist Dante Simbulan pinpointed 169 families. They’ve
produced 584 public officials, including
seven presidents, two vice presidents,
42 senators and 147 representatives.)
Another clone: “Argentina’s Supreme Court has been repeatedly
tampered with.” (Corazon Aquino
fired the Marcos Supreme Court after
assuming office through People Power in 1986—except for Claudio Teehankee who was the lone independent
voice. He was to become chief justice.)
Political interference destroyed
the credibility of Argentina’s statistical office. Graft is endemic. Argentina
ranks a shoddy 106th in Transparency International’s corruption index.
(The Philippines improved its score
in Transparency International’s Index 2013, which ranked 177 countries
from “highly corrupt” to “very clean.”
We came in 94, up from last year’s
105th. We lagged behind Singapore
[5th] but was ahead of Cambodia
[160th]. The country was bracketed
with Algeria, Colombia and India.)
“Building institutions is a dull, slow
business.” But Argentine leaders preferred the quick fix—of charismatic
leaders, miracle tariffs and currency

pegs, rather than, say, a thorough reform of the country’s schools.
“Argentina’s decline has been seductively gradual.” It didn’t reel from
dictators as monumental as Mao or
Stalin. In the downward spiral, Buenos Aires cafés continued to serve
espressos and medialunas. That
makes this especially dangerous.
The bigger threat festers in the
emerging world, The Economist asserted. Uninterrupted progress to
prosperity takes the sheen of bogus
inevitability. Too many countries
surge forward on commodity exports, but neglect their institutions.
Their weaknesses could be exposed just as Argentina’s was. Populism stalks many emerging countries;
constitutions are being stretched.
Overreliant on oil and gas, many are
ruled by kleptocrats strapped with a
dangerously high self-regard.
In Turkey, the autocratic Recep
Tayyip Erdogan blends Evita with Islam. In too many parts of emerging Asia,
crony capitalism remains the order of
the day. “Inequality is feeding the same
anger that produced the Perons.”
Would Imelda sing as Evita? “And
as for fortune and as for fame / I never invited them in/ Though it seemed
to the world they were all I desired/
They are illusions…” ■

AT LARGE

‘Manay’ Gina’s wide network
By Rina Jimenez-David
Philippine Daily Inquirer
“ONLY GINA could gather a crowd
like this,” remarked former House
Speaker and Gina’s hubby Joe de
Venecia, observing that she had managed to gather in one place people
(mostly women) from the disparate
worlds of politics, show business,
business, media and NGOs.
Indeed, only “Manay” Gina, congresswoman from Pangasinan and
president of the women legislators’
group, could have gathered around one
table Imelda Marcos and Loi Ejercito,
and on the next table Ballsy Aquino
Cruz and Viel Aquino Dee, with Sen.
Loren Legarda, Sen. Grace Poe and her
mother Susan Roces, Regal Films matriarch “Mother” Lily Monteverde, and
Tessie Sy Coson of the SM empire surrounding them. On one table, a group
of Gina’s classmates from Assumption
cheered her on, while in another were
seated members of INA, or Ina na Naulila ng Anak, the NGO Gina founded
with media personality Ali Sotto after
the deaths of their children.
We were witnessing around the
function room at the Gloria Maris
restaurant the fruits of Gina’s hard
work and networking for many years,
dating from her childhood as one of

the daughters of Doc Jose Perez of
Sampaguita Films (“the world where
I grew up in,” Gina would acknowledge), as the better half of congressman Joe and then president of the
Congressional Spouses Foundation,
and thence her coming into her own
as she took over her husband’s congressional district and assumed responsibility heading the women’s
caucus in the House.
“You may have noticed that the
great majority of my guests are women,” Manay Gina noted in her brief
remarks. “And that is because it is
women—aside from my family—who
are my chief sources of strength and
inspiration these days.”
***
“Manong” Joe, still showing signs
of pain as he recovers from a broken
collarbone in an accident late last year,
shared the “many reasons I love Gina.”
First was her putting up, as head of
the Congressional Spouses Foundation, a network of safe houses called
“The Haven” for victims of domestic
violence and sexual abuse. From one
center in Muntinlupa, “The Haven”
has since expanded to over 30 locations around the country, joined in
time by “Havens” for street children
and abandoned senior citizens.
After losing their daughter KC in

a fire, Gina channeled her grief and
pain into establishing INA, and setting up a counseling center for grieving parents inside the DSWD compound in Quezon City.
But Manay Gina has built a network
that consists not just of buildings and
centers, but even more significant, an
even wider network of friends built
and maintained by unfailing consideration and caring. As one congresswoman remarked: “Manay Gina’s
generosity is legend, she gives us souvenirs from her travels and even little
items like shawls and food.”

“...[O]nly
“Manay”
Gina...could have gathered
around one table Imelda
Marcos and Loi Ejercito, and
on the next table Ballsy Aquino
Cruz and Viel Aquino Dee...”
And all these packaged with charm
and sincerity. Gina may have learned
the ropes of dealing with people from
all walks of life from her producerfather who treated stars and bit players in his Sampaguita stable as family,
along with production staffers, talents
and fans. But perhaps it is not “lessons
learned” that propel her, so much as
DNA, as entertainment—and what is
politics but another form of entertain-

www.canadianinquirer.net

ment—clearly runs in her blood?
May the years be kind, Manay
Gina, and may you expand your network of do-gooding even further in
the future!
***
Twenty years after the groundbreaking Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, a
conference where the term “sexual
and reproductive health and rights”
entered the lexicon, women have
shown remarkable progress.
In a New York Times commentary, Somini Sengupta observed that
women have gained “greater control
over their health and destiny, women
worldwide have fewer children, are
less likely to die of childbirth and
have made great strides in literacy.”
Based on a report of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), these
rosy findings, however, have a dark
lining to them. In poor countries, and
in poor communities in these countries “women’s status, maternal death,
and child marriage,” the prevalence of
which indicate continuing violations of
women’s rights, remain high.
“In poor countries,” observes Sengupta, “pregnancy and childbirth are
the leading cause of death among
young women ages 15 to 19. Women
continue to be paid less and they are

more likely to work in jobs that are
less secure and with fewer benefits.”
***
Babatunde Osotimehin, UNFPA
executive director, forwards an “obvious” solution: “Men have to change.
They have to accept gender equality.”
One worrying statistic is that
worldwide, one in three women
reported being physically or sexually abused. In Asia, a separate study
found that nearly half of the 10,000
men interviewed reported using
physical or sexual violence against
a female partner, while a fourth of
them said they had raped a woman
or girl, with the vast majority saying
they faced no prosecution.
Concluded the report: “Progress
has been unequal and fragmented.”
And as Sengupta observed: “The
changes may have come at a time
when the world has prospered overall, though women in the poorest
countries, along with poor women in
some richer countries, have not seen
their lives improve.”
It seems obvious, then, that while
gender disparities continue to haunt
the lives of women in the poorest areas, it is still prosperity and a way out
of poverty that will lift women out
of their abject status and empower
them to pursue better lives. ■

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

18

Canada News
NEWS BRIEFS

FROM THE CANADIAN PRESS
PHOTO BY JAMIE ROACH / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Rob Ford says he’s offended when
people say he’s homophobic
BY ALLISON JONES
The Canadian Press
TORONTO—Toronto Mayor Rob
Ford said in a YouTube video released
Tuesday that he’s offended by claims
he’s homophobic, while his city councillor brother suggested people in the
gay community are “bullies.”
The brothers made the comments
in the second instalment of their online “Ford Nation” show, consisting
of a series of clips of varying lengths
in which they slag fellow councillors
and take one question.
The query appears to have come
via email from “Mary from Scarborough,” who is identified as the mother of a gay son. She referenced Ford’s
stance against a rainbow flag at city
hall and recent comments about not
attending the annual pride parade.
Ford read the question, in which
“Mary” suggested Ford is homophobic
and asked why people should vote for
him if he doesn’t support all citizens.
“I am not homophobic,” Ford said.
“I’ll go to anyone’s house, anyone’s
place to help them out. I take offence
when people say that to me.”
A rainbow flag—a long-standing
symbol of lesbian, gay, bisexual and

transgender rights and pride—was
raised at city hall earlier this month
as the Sochi Winter Olympics began.
Ford said he wanted it taken down.
He was told the flag was flown as a
gesture to protest anti-gay laws in
Russia, but Ford said the Olympics
are about patriotism, not “sexual
preference.”
“Our Canadian flag should be up
there, not the pride flag,” Ford said in
his YouTube show.
But the rainbow flag did not replace a Canadian flag. It was put up
on a “courtesy” flag pole which otherwise flies the City of Toronto flag.

Multiple flag poles around city hall
fly the Canadian flag and the city flags
at all times.
Rob Ford then turned it over to his
brother, Coun. Doug Ford, who suggested the gay community and its supporters are “bullies” to people who
don’t attend the annual pride parade.
The mayor had said in the past that
he didn’t attend the annual pride parade because of a family tradition of
spending the Canada Day long weekend at the cottage. But when asked
earlier this month if he was planning
❱❱ PAGE 44 Rob Ford

Fed study says education can combat
low public confidence in justice system
BY DEAN BEEBY
The Canadian Press
OTTAWA—An internal Justice Department report says Canadians
have little confidence in the courts
and the prison system—and the best
way to counter those perceptions is
through education.
Opposition critics argue that
message is at odds with the Conservative justice agenda, which they
say simply exploits public misunderstanding of justice issues by en-

acting tough-on-crime measures
that can be harmful.
The federal report summarizes a
decade’s worth of opinion polls and
research, some of it unpublished,
that has consistently found high
confidence in the police.
But research shows Canadians
also see the courts as too slow to deliver justice, and judges as handing
out sentences that are too lenient.
The research indicates the public
believes victims are too often ignored in the justice system, and that
prisons do a poor job of rehabilitat-

ing offenders.
The study, prepared for a policing
symposium last month in Ottawa,
was obtained by The Canadian Press
under the Access to Information Act.
“The public generally believes
that sentences are too lenient and
that the corrections system is not
doing a great job of rehabilitating
offenders,” says the 13-page report.
Author Charlotte Fraser, a Justice
Department employee, notes that
Canadians’ generally low levels of
❱❱ PAGE 39 Fed study

OTTAWA—Four years after the federal government ratified the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,
Canada has released its first report into how
disabled Canadians are faring. The report,
prepared collaboratively by Ottawa and the
provinces and territories, says there are ongoing challenges for Canadians with disabilities,
including barriers to language and communication, learning and training, and safety and
security.
FEDS ASK PUBLIC FOR INPUT ON
PROSTITUTION LAW
OTTAWA—The Conservative government
wants to hear from Canadians about how to
rewrite the country’s prostitution laws after
those laws were struck down by the Supreme
Court late last year.A month-long online
consultation period on the Justice Canada
website begins today and runs to March 17.
ONTARIO LEGISLATURE RAISES RAINBOW
FLAG
TORONTO—With just five days to go until the
end of the Sochi Olympics, the rainbow flag
is finally flying at the Ontario legislature. The
three elected parties all agreed on Feb. 10 to
ask the Speaker for permission to fly the Pride
flag, but it wasn’t granted until Tuesday, when
the legislative session resumed.
STANLEY CUP AT CANADA HOUSE CAUSES STIR
SOCHI—The Stanley Cup made an appearance
at Canada Olympic House on Monday and it
didn’t sit well with one former Olympian. While
athletes from several sports converged to see
hockey’s most prized trophy, former Canadian
skier Brian Stemmle tweeted his opposition to
the event.

Canada News

19 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Edmonton man charged with
marriage scam, was to get
$5,000 from bride: CBSA

EDMONTON—An Edmonton man has been charged
with marriage fraud in
what the Canada Border Services Agency
says is a first in Alberta.
The agency
alleges
60-year-old
Gilbert Leland Platts
of Edmonton was to get money from his
foreign bride for the phoney relationship.
“It’s alleged that he entered
into an agreement with this
woman that she would pay
him $5,000 to marry her and
then she would be able to get
a permanent residency status

in Canada,”
spokesman
Sean Best
s a i d
Tuesday.

“It’s alleged that he had already received a portion of that
money and he would receive
the other portion at the time
she did receive her status in
Canada.”
The agency started investigating in April 2012 after receiving a tip about a possible

scam marriage.
Best said he couldn’t reveal
details about the woman, including which country she is
from.
The court charges list the
woman as Venus Platts.
The Immigration and Refugee Board said Venus Tandog
Platts, a woman in her late 30s,
received an exclusion order
last May requiring her to
leave Canada. Records show
the Philippines native entered Canada as a worker in
2007 and married in 2010.
Gilbert Platts is charged with
misrepresentation and counselling misrepresentation under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. He faces a
maximum fine of $100,000 or
up to five years in prison.
He is to appear in an Edmonton court on March 20. ■

www.canadianinquirer.net

VICTORIA— B.C.’S transportation minister is defending
ferry-service cuts, particularly
on minor and northern routes,
saying the high cost of low ridership can’t be justified.
Todd Stone told the legislature
hours before the government
delivered its budget that the Discovery Coast circle-tour route,
which connects Port Hardy on
Vancouver Island with several
central coast communities, lost
almost $7.5 million last year.
He says the vessel servicing the summer-only route
will need to be replaced within
three years at a cost of more
than $100 million.
Stone says the three-month
service for about 500 vehicles is
not sustainable and balancing

the budget requires the government to make tough decisions.
NDP transportation critic
Claire Trevena says service adjustments effective April 28 mean
it will take 33 hours instead of the
current eight hours to make the
trip, based on estimates from the
business community, and that
the reduced vessel size will accommodate only 16 vehicles at a
time, down from 115 vehicles.
But the Transportation Ministry says upcoming route adjustments mean it will take about 16.5
hours to travel the route, compared to the current 12 to 13 hours.
New Democrat MLA Gary
Holman says constituents are
complaining that communities
will become ghost towns, while
Trevena says European tour
operators are horrified about
the cuts to the popular attraction. ■

World News

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

FRIDAY 20

French official says 11 eurozone nations seek to
propose financial transaction tax by May
BY JUERGEN BAETZ
The Associated Press
BRUSSELS,
BELGIUM—A
group of 11 European countries
is pushing ahead with the introduction of a tax on financial
transactions and wants to present a plan by May, French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said Tuesday.
Officials started pushing for
the tax in the wake of the 20089 financial crisis to curb speculation by investors and claw
back revenues following the
government bailouts of banks.
While the idea is seductive for
policymakers, its implementation has proved a headache and
the nations involved—the bloc’s
major economies except Britain—haven’t been able to reach
an agreement for over a year.
“We have to make progress,”
German Finance Minister
Wolfgang Schaeuble said ahead
of a meeting of the finance ministers from the 11 eurozone nations. He said the tax may have

to be introduced bit by bit, rather than as one package.
The main difficulty is determining what financial products
should be taxed and to what
extent. It’s still unclear where
shares, derivatives and other
products would be taxed: In the
country where they are issued,
where they are bought, or both?
EU nations estimate the levy
could yield tens of billions of
euros (dollars) annually.

Germany and France, the European Union’s largest economies, are strongly in favour of
the levy, but Britain, which is
home to the bloc’s biggest financial hub, London, is adamantly opposed, saying it will
undermine the banks’ competitiveness.
At a separate meeting in
Brussels, the EU’s 28 finance
ministers sought new ways to
reach an agreement with Euro-

pean lawmakers on the timely
creation of a body that can
unwind or restructure ailing
banks, the so-called single resolution mechanism.
Ministers and the European
Parliament are at odds on the
authority’s structure and on
how to ensure that its common backstop fund will be sufficient in times of crisis. It is
set to be financed by a bank
levy that would raise 50 billion

euros ($69 billion) by 2026,
but there’s no agreement yet
on what funds could be used if
more were needed.
“The easy answer on the
question ‘will there be enough
money?’ can be to allow ... the
fund to borrow from markets,”
said Dutch Finance Minister
Jeroen Dijsselbloem. Allowing
for a borrowing capacity would
require government guarantees, he added.
But Germany’s Schaeuble
rejected that idea, insisting the
banks alone must be on the
hook. “We have to make clear
that the final bill is taken by the
(financial) industry.”
Time is tight, however. European lawmakers need to pass
legislation creating the bank rescue body before the Parliament’s
term expires in May, or the project will be delayed until 2015.
The body would accompany a
new centralized banking oversight that is part of the bloc’s
planned wider banking union,
the eurozone’s main effort to
stabilize its financial system. ■

‘A diplomatic role’: 19 year old skier gets ready to
become East Timor’s first Winter Olympian
BY ANDREW DAMPF
AND HOWARD FENDRICH
The Associated Press
KRASNAYA POLYANA, RUSSIA—”It all started,” East
Timor’s first Winter Olympian
says, “as a joke.”
When Yohan Goncalves
Goutt was 8 years old, on a
skiing vacation in his native
France, a family friend kiddingly told him that if he kept at it
with the sport, one day he could
make it to the Olympics.
“It stuck in my head,” Goncalves Goutt says now, “and I
wanted it to become a dream
come true.”
So here he is, at 19, preparing
to compete as an Alpine skier in
the Sochi Games, representing
East Timor, where he founded
the officially recognized ski
federation. His race, the slalom,
is Saturday night.
He sees his role in Russia as

twofold: He’s an athlete, sure,
but he’s also a sort of ambassador for East Timor, the impoverished southeast Asian nation
that was a Portuguese colony,
was invaded by Indonesia in
1975, and became a sovereign
state in 2002 after the United
Nations intervened.
“In a way, I’m doing something for the Timorese. I’m
helping out. I’m showing that
Timor exists, and maybe some
people will want to invest in
Timor. And so that’s my sort
of diplomatic role that I have
here,” Goncalves Goutt said in
an interview with The Associated Press after training Monday
on a hill blanketed by thick fog.
“In the future, I would like to
go back to Timor if I get sponsors after Sochi ... to create
sports centres. This is one of
my aims, because I believe that
in a country that needs to grow
up, education is really important, but I think sports can re-

ally help a lot as well,” he said.
“Today I’m sure that a lot of
people know about Timor because of the flag that was at the
(Sochi opening) ceremony, and
they just it looked up on Google,
maybe, and now they know.”
Born in Paris—”Not really a ski
area,” he says with a smile—to a
French father, who is in the importexport business, and Timorese
mother, who works full-time to
help her skiing son, Goncalves
Goutt carries both passports.
“My mom gave me the Timorese language, culture, history. And my dad gave me this
very French thing of going skiing in the winter,” he said. “I’m
just so happy today I can combine both.”
Goncalves Goutt prefers listing his dual last names with his
mother’s first, because he is
representing East Timor at the
Olympics.
He often gets asked why
he didn’t try to compete for
www.canadianinquirer.net

France, instead. But Goncalves
Goutt knows, first of all, how
much more difficult it would
have been to make that talented team, as opposed to being a
team of one.
“It never crossed my mind,
because it’s a way of not losing
the connection with my country. I have Timorese blood,” he
said, rubbing his left arm, “and I
want to keep that connection.”
With daytime temperatures
of about 85 degrees (30 Celsius)
much of the year, East Timor is
not exactly home to many skiers. The nation of more than 1
million people has been represented at the Summer Olympics; two finished marathons
at the 2012 London Games, for
example
Goncalves Goutt, who trained
Monday wearing a red, yellow, orange and black plaid ski
suit, proudly points out that he
qualified for the Sochi Olympics based on his skiing results.

While he’s never competed in a
top-level World Cup race, he did
finish 14th out of 43 entrants in
a slalom in Iran last month.
Goncalves Goutt needed to
pull together a $75,000 budget
to make his Olympic wish happen, and a lot of that money
came out of his— and his family’s— own pockets.
In addition to giving him a
chance to meet skiers he has
looked up to, including American star Bode Miller, it’s also
allowed Goncalves Goutt to
spread the word about his
mother’s homeland.
“Timor has a lot of suffering
and a sad story. We can’t forget it,” he said. “But we have to
move on and I hope that being
in the Winter Olympic Games
could make a nice story for
Timor as well. And hopefully
now, when people type ‘East
Timor’ on Google, they won’t
see all this war, all these bad
things. Some positive light.” ■

World News

21 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Congressional budget
office: Minimum wage
hike raises income for over
16.5M but cost 500K jobs
BY ALAN FRAM
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON—Boosting the federal
minimum wage as President Barack
Obama and congressional Democrats
are proposing would increase earnings
for more than 16.5 million people by
2016 but also cut employment by roughly 500,000 workers, Congress’
nonpartisan budget analyst
said Tuesday.
The report by the Congressional Budget Office was released as the Senate prepares
to debate a Democratic proposal to gradually boost today’s $7.25 hourly minimum
wage to $10.10 by 2016. The
proposal is backed by Obama,
but it faces strong Republican opposition and long odds of approval by Congress.
The analysis immediately added fuel

to the partisan dispute over the proposal. It put authoritative weight behind
long-time GOP claims that increasing
the minimum wage would cost jobs by
forcing companies to spend more on
wages.
“This report confirms what we’ve long
known: While helping some, mandating higher wages has real costs, including fewer people working,” said Brendan Buck,

spokesman for House Speaker John
Boehner, R-Ohio. “With unemployment Americans’ top concern, our focus
should be creating—not destroying—

jobs for those who need them most.”
Democrats have said such claims
are overblown and outweighed by the
benefits to workers and the overall
economy as low-paid employees spend
more money. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa,
author of the Senate legislation, cited
other research concluding that a higher
minimum wage would create jobs,
not reduce them.
“And as the CBO report affirms,
an increase in the minimum wage
will help lift families out of poverty,”
Harkin said.
The report said as a result of the minimum wage increase, there would be
900,000 fewer people living below the
federal poverty line.

www.canadianinquirer.net

The CBO study examined a proposal
similar to Harkin’s and focused on the
plan’s impact in late 2016, when it would
take full effect. After 2016, Harkin’s bill
would require the minimum wage to be
increased annually to reflect rising inflation.
The analysts said their estimate of employment losses was approximate. They
said the actual impact could range from
a very slight employment reduction to a
loss of 1 million workers.
The report said that besides boosting wages for people earning less than
$10.10 hourly, some people making
more than that amount would also see
higher earnings as bosses adjust their
pay scales upward. ■

Immigration

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

FRIDAY 22

Strengthening Canadian Citizenship
Act: A comparative view
Current Act

Proposed Act

• Residence for three out of four years (1,095
days);
• No requirement that resident be physically
present;
• Time as a non-permanent resident (non-PR)
may be counted toward residence for citizenship;
• No intent to reside provision

• Requires physical presence for four years
(1,460 days) out of the six years;
• 183 days minimum of physical presence per
year in four out of six years;
• Eliminate use of time spent in Canada as a
non-permanent resident (non-PR);
• Introduce “intent to reside” provision

• Adult applicants aged 18–54 must meet
language requirements and pass knowledge
test; upper age limit of 54 currently established by policy, not in legislation;
• Applicants can meet knowledge requirement with assistance of an interpreter

• Requires applicants aged 14–64 to meet
language requirements and pass knowledge
test;
• Applicants must meet knowledge requirement in English or French

• Most “Lost Canadians” had their citizenship • Extends citizenship to “Lost Canadians”
restored in 2009, but some “Lost Canadians” born before 1947 as well as their 1st generawere not covered by that change and are not tion children born abroad
eligible for citizenship
• Bars getting citizenship from people with
domestic criminal charges and convictions

• Expands bar on getting citizenship to people with foreign criminal charges and convictions

• Consultants not required to be registered or
regulated in order to represent individuals in
citizenship manner;
• Few tools to deter fraud and ensure program integrity;
• Fines and penalties for fraud are a maximum of $1,000 and/or one year in prison

• Defines who is an authorized representative
and provides authority to develop regulations
to designate a regulatory body whose members would be authorized to act as consultants in citizenship matters;
• Authority to refuse applicant for fraud; fines
and penalties for fraud are a maximum

• Governor in Council (GIC) final decision
maker for citizenship revocation

• Gives Citizenship and Immigration Canada
(CIC) Minister authority to decide on routine
revocation cases
• Complex revocation cases such as war
crimes, crimes against humanity, security,
other human or international rights violations, and organized criminality decided by
the Federal Court

• GIC final decision maker on discretionary
grants of citizenship

• Gives CIC Minister the authority to decide
on discretionary grants of citizenship

• Limited authority to define what constitutes
a complete application

• Establishes authority to define what constitutes a complete application and what
evidence applicants must provide

• No authority to revoke
citizenship for acts against
Canada’s national interest

• Establishes the authority to
revoke Canadian citizenship
from dual citizens who were
members of an armed force
or an organized armed group
engaged in armed conflict
with Canada, and deny it to
PRs for the same reasons
• Authority to revoke Canadian citizenship and deny
it to PRs who are convicted
of terrorism, high treason,
treason, or spying offences,
depending on the sentence
received

• No fast-track mechanism
for citizenship for members
of the military to honour
their service to the Canadian
Armed Forces and address
deployment challenges

• Creates a fast-track mechanism for citizenship for PRs
serving with—and individuals on exchange with— the
Canadian Armed Forces
to honour their service to
Canada

Immigration

23 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Canada is not a hotel: Kenney
BY MELISSA REMULLABRIONES
Philippine Canadian Inquirer
RICHMOND, B.C.—Mr. Jason
Kenney, Minister of Employment and Development and
Minister of Multiculturalism,
came to Richmond to discuss
the budget unveiled by Minister Jim Flaherty as Economic
Action Plan 2014 but was—und e r st a n d a b l y— b o m b a r d e d
by questions on the spate of
changes on the immigration
front.
Indeed, media representatives of three of the largest
and fastest growing immigrant
population in Canada—the Chinese, South Asians and Filipinos—met with the minister at
a roundtable to seek answers to
questions that are making their
groups very concerned: Bill
C-24, the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act and what
it would spell for their groups
in the near future.
The proposed law is the first
comprehensive reform to the

Citizenship Act since 1977.
Some of the pressing questions of the reporters included
the longer residency requirement, the cancellation of the
immigrant investor program
and the new “expression of interest“ system.
Longer residency requirement

“Canada is not a hotel. Our
passport is not a document of
convenience. It’s not a political insurance policy. it implies
mutual obligations. it implies
being committed to this country in longer terms,” said Mr.
Kenney.
Most developed countries
like Australia and the UK actually require five, six, seven
years of residency, according to
the minister.
Thus, under the new law, to
make sure that Canada will
have citizens that have formed
“meaningful attachments” to
the country, immigrants seeking citizenship must reside in
Canada for four out of the previous six years, an increase of
one year from the old law, “[E]

Minister Jason Kenney

PCI FILE PHOTO

specially given the number of
people who in the past dodged
around the rules,” the minister
explained.
The RCMP has investigated
residency fraud in the past few
years and found more than
10,000 cases of people who
faked proof of their residency.
People also showed up at citizenship ceremonies with their
suitcases packed, ready to go
back to their country of origin.

“All of that will end with the
exit-entry information system
that we’re putting in place by
the end of this year,” Mr. Kenney said.
“And I hope with the new
requirements, applicants for
citizenship actually file tax returns. No longer will we accept
the notion that someone can be
a permanent resident for citizenship applications but at the
same time be a non-resident for

tax purposes,” he says.
Mr. Kenney clarified, however, that the longer residency
requirement will not apply to
people who are already permanent residents in Canada.
“They will be grandfathered
under the proposed Strengthening Citizenship Act. It will
only be for newcomers who arrive after that act is adopted.”
❱❱ PAGE 39 Canada is not

“Attracting and retaining the best international talent to
fill skills shortages in key occupations is critical to Canada’s
economic success.”
- Hon. Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P.

Minister of Employment and Social Development

Respond to Canada’s need for immigrants.

Become a Regulated
Immigration Consultant
Full-time | Part-time | Online
Apply online at www.ashtoncollege.com or
contact a program adviser at (604) 899-0803.

BY CHING DEE
Philippine Canadian Inquirer
EVERY PINOY must have
heard the expression “mula
Aparri hanggang Jolo” (from
Aparri to Jolo) at least once in
their lifetime.
To put this in perspective,
Aparri is more than 500 kilometers from Manila, which is
about 18 hours by bus—if you’re
lucky.
Despite such distance, Frank
Tan and (then) Olga Alvarado’s
paths crossed.
Destiny written all over

Francisco “Frank” Tan Jr.
is a native of Pasig City, while
Olga Dumlao Alvarado grew up
in Aparri, Cagayan. He studied Fisheries Technology and
earned his master’s degree in
government management from
the University of the Philippines, she earned her Pharmacy
degree from the University of
Santo Tomas.
In spite of the differences,
Frank found Olga and Olga
found Frank.
Together, they built their
humble beginnings in Cagayan
Valley, where Frank was assigned as the regional director
of the Bureau of Fisheries and
Aquatic Resources and Olga established her own drug store.
They got married on January
25, 1964.
Remember that old cliché,
“if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to
be?” Well, this lovely couple is a
living testament to that beat-up
saying. No matter the distance,
despite taking different disciplines in difference universities, they still found their way
to each other.
Recently, Frank and Olga
celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in downtown
Toronto. The couple renewed
their marriage vows with the
help of Rev. Fr. John Sullivan,
parish priest at Our Lady of
Lourdes Church, as the officiator.
After the ceremonies, a formal reception was held at the
Ellas Hospitality Center in
Danforth Road, Toronto. Relatives and close friends joined
the Tan family as they celebrated 50 years of blissful togetherness. Eleanor Alvarado
Calbes-Thomson
serenaded

Frank, Olga, and their guests.
And of course, the festivities
wouldn’t be complete without
performance from their grandchildren.
Talk about destiny, eh?
More than blessings

Frank and Olga’s love brought
them unspeakable joy and
priceless rewards in the form of
their five children.
They consider them to be the
source of their pride. And why
not? After raising five achievers, they should give themselves a pat on the back for a job
very well done.
Their eldest daughter, Liesel,
earned her degree in medicine
from Manila Central University. She is now a registered nurse
in Canada and currently working as the Nurse-in-Charge
at the Leisure World Nursing
home in Mississauga. She is
married to Jose Aguila. They
have two children.
Rommel, their second child,
finished his accountancy degree in San Beda College. He
is now working for a British financial company in Mississauga. He married Jocelyn Co and
they have two kids together.
The middle child, Vanessa,
earned her degree in pharmacy
from Centro Escolar University. She is now a licensed pharmacist in Canada. She is running her own drugstore with
the help of her husband, Aftabul Habib. They have two kids.
Ramie earned his degree in
medical technology from his
mom’s Alma Mater—University of Santo Tomas. Today, he
is working as a licensed medical
technologist at the Blood Bank
of Toronto East General Hospital. He married Myla Tan and
they bore two children.
Last but certainly not the
least, their youngest kid Omar
is an Economics graduate from
York University. Now, he is
working at the Bank of New
York in Bermuda.
“I’m very thankful that
they’re all obedient children.
They follow our [advice]. Our
children are very good because
they are religious… They know
how to give and take with their
brothers and sisters and help
each other. There’s nothing
more we can wish [for] because
everything is okay with us.”
Just in case you failed to do

The Tans’ family photo.

the math, their five kids have
blessed Frank and Olga with
eight grandchildren—all between the ages of 6 to 18.
Moving to Canada

With the encouragement of
Frank’s sister and the hope of
finding a better future for their
children, Frank and Olga decided to move to Canada in November 1991 with their entire
family.
“I was invited by my sister
who happens to be a professor
in the University of Toronto,
a doctor of psychology,” Frank
shared. “She told us that our
children will have a better future here, although I’m okay na
in the Philippines.”
At first, Frank’s relatives
helped them out as they all
tried to find whatever job they
could in order to make a living.
For Frank and his household,
the biggest challenge they faced
after moving to a new country
was employment.
“Number one there is finding
your profession—a job in order
to support the family, any kind
of job you [can] take,” Frank
said.
Frank himself met some new
friends who introduced him to
the Primerica Financial Corporation. He started out as a subscriber, then an agent, and he
continued to work for financial
services for some time.
As for their kids who all
www.canadianinquirer.net

earned their college degrees
back in the Philippines, most of
them had to study again in Canada to get accreditation.
“They have to study again
here,” Frank said about his children.
“It was very, very discouraging,” he noted, “but I told them,
‘you have a better future here.
Just take your chance and be
patient’.”
And patient they all were.
Frank, Olga, and their five children started to take odd jobs
here and there to make ends
meet—both in school and at
home.
“My two daughters, they
[worked as nannies] for my sister in their condominium, at
least they can support us,” he
recalled.
“And my other [sons], one
worked in McDonald’s and
the other one worked with my
brother-in-law who happens to
be in capitals management,” he
continued.
Despite the challenges, Frank
noted that the Canadian government, even more than two
decades ago, has always been
helpful—even to immigrants
like him and his family.
“The government here in
Canada is very helpful,” Frank
pointed out.
Around three or four years
later, after years of working
during the day and studying at
night, their kids finally finished

their studies, earned their accreditation, and found better
jobs. Since then, everything
started to get better.
Today, almost 23 years after
they flew to The Great White
North, Frank and Olga still
think of home.
“We used to go home to the
Philippines every year, because [she still has] relatives
in Cagayan Valley to visit. In
my case, I still have nieces and
nephews in Makati. We have to
see them and see how their lives
are doing.”
Words from the Wise

For those who just arrived
in Canada (or for those who
are planning to make The Big
Move), Frank shared two pieces
of advice based on experience.
“The first important thing to
do is to join any community organization. From there, you can
have networks and find some
help, and whatever you do, you
owe it to the community,” he
said.
As for the second advice:
“The point is: do not lose
hope, just keep on working and
keep on praying that the Lord
will help you in what you’re doing. Don’t lose hope and everything will come out alright… If
you lose hope, you’re a goner.
Hope is always there. It will
come out okay. Just keep on
praying [for] whatever you are
doing and the Lord will help.” ■

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

25

Remembering Edsa
The Ghost of EDSA Past, Present and Future
BY ANGIE DUARTE
Philippine Canadian Inquirer
THE CAB driver and I sat in
stunned silence, the air between us heavy with disgust
and dismay, as the lady on the
radio recounted how she had—
on several occasions—delivered large sums of money to
lawmakers in their Senate offices, or to their homes. Sometimes (for sums of one or two
million pesos only, she would
use her handbag; others times,
for amounts up to eleven million, she would use a carry-on
bag with wheels). Her bad back
couldn’t handle the weight of
the cash, she said.
Ruby Tuason’s testimony
before the Senate Blue Ribbon
Committee in the long-drawn
out pork barrel scam was on everyone’s agenda on the morning of February 13, 2014, and for
once, I was thankful to be stuck
in rush-hour traffic. I wanted
to hear what she had to say, no
matter that it made me balk, or
how—to my already frayed “life
in the Philippines” sensibilities—each word sounded like
nails down a chalkboard.
I realized the driver was asking me a question, so I tuned out
of the testimony to tune in to
his query. It was half-question,
half-thought-spoken-out-loud:
“Ma’am, ano kaya ang itsura ng
ganoon kadaming pera? Hindi
ko maisip, Ma’am. (Ma’am, I
wonder what that much money
looks like? I cannot even imagine it, Ma’am.)” He could not
visualize it; neither could I; for
I, like the cabbie, belong to the

class that—on these islands—
works hard for their meager
amounts of money. Way, way
too hard; for way, way too little.
Neither of us could imagine what millions in cold, hard
cash would look like; nor could
we fathom the incredible lack
of soul, conscience, and shred
of humanity in the people who
thought it “ok” to steal these
millions from their fellowFilipinos. After all, a kickback
comes from money allocated
for projects, which in turn
comes from the country’s coffers, which we all know comes
from the people’s taxes paid
from very, very hard work; for
very, very little recompense.
Despicable. Utterly so.
EDSA? What EDSA?

As the cab neared my place of
work, we drove by some EDSA
anniversary flyer or other, pasted to an electric post (presumably to stay there until weathering takes its natural course).
On the 25th of February, 2014,
it will be the 27th anniversary
of the People’s Power movement that took place on EDSA,
to oust the overstaying dictator,
and thrust the hapless housewife into the highest seat in
the land. It was the movement
that catapulted the Philippines
to global political and sociocultural fame. It was the movement that the annals of history will forever remember as
the peaceful revolution of the
masses that, in 1986, restored
democracy in the Philippines.
It was the movement that united a nation, across all socioeconomic barriers; regardless

An iconic photo of the EDSA Revolution in the Philippines in February 1986 showing hundreds of thousands of people
filling up Epifanio delos Santos Avenue (EDSA). The view is looking northbound towards the Boni Serrano Avenue-EDSA
intersection.
WIKIPEDIA PHOTO

of class; and despite political
and religious beliefs towards a
common and noble goal.
Yet in that cab, it was the
movement that made me just
about snort in derision.
Where is the EDSA spirit
now? What happened to all that
hope and promise?
Punk’s not dead. Is the spirit of
EDSA?

The Ghost of EDSA past came
to haunt me, as I recalled a time
that was charged with the certainty of a better tomorrow, and
of a bright future for our country— finally.
Let’s throwback to 1983;
to the revolution’s first birth
pangs. Ninoy Aquino’s return to

the country after several years
in exile was as highly anticipated as it was dreaded. People
feared for his life, yet no one
expected the end to come so
quickly. He had barely stepped
onto the soil of his native land
when shots rang out, finding
their mark in Ninoy. His lifeless
body was unceremoniously and
hurriedly tossed into a waiting
security van seconds thereafter. Video footage left people in
shock; stunned by the brazenness of it all.
Shock turned into mourning,
which later morphed into outrage, as the icon of long-overdue change lay dead in a coffin—his face, disfigured by the
assassin’s bullet and purposely

left un-retouched. The people’s
sentiments began to simmer;
then seethe.
Yet for two more years after
his death, democracy lay dead
in the tomb. And on the third
year, she rose again.
It was 1986 and I was a young
punk in my senior year of high
school; sporting asymmetrical
hair, fishnets, studs and boots
long before these were integrated into Manila’s stream of
fashion consciousness.
Under pressure from Uncle
Sam and from an increasingly
disgruntled Filipino populace
to prove the legitimacy of his
20-year-rule, President Marcos
❱❱ PAGE 31 The Ghost

Remembering Edsa

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

FRIDAY 26

10 Little Things we can do for the Philippines
BY KATHERINE MARFALTEVES
Philippine Canadian Inquirer

With hard work, determination
and commitment, we can definitely move ahead.

There is so much to see and celebrate.
7. Be an ambassador.
If foreign tourists ask, “What
is beautiful about the Philippines?,” boast a little. There's
really much we can be proud of
in our own Pearl of the Orient.

2. Support local products.
What’s in the tag of your
favorite shirt? Does it show
that it's “Made in the Philippines”? In his book, “12 Littlle
Things We Can Do To Help
Our Country,” Alexander Lacson explained that we have to
support our local products. It
shows how proud we are to be
Filipino—and a subtle way to
represent the Philippines and
introduce our products to citizens of other countries.

In his book “Tipping Point”
Malcolm Gladwell said, "Do
not underestimate the power
of little things, they can spur
a revolution.” This statement
best describes how little, seemingly inconsequential events
can lead to an awakening and a
valiant fight for democracy.
But on the 28th anniversary
of the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution, it is no longer
enough to bask in its memory.
We have to perform—again—
little, seemingly inconsequential things to help our country,
and ourselves, move forward.
1. Find a job or be productive.
According to a recent Social
Weather Stations (SWS) survey, 12.1 million Filipinos are
currently jobless. While this
figure is quite understandable due to the calamities that
struck the country (according
to Malacanang), we have to rise
from our stupor and realize we
can do something about our lot.

3. Obey laws.
Think, "All I Needed to Know
I Learned in Kindergarten."
Yes, the book. Throw peace and
order in and you get the picture.
From following the simple
traffic rules to paying the right
taxes—it can spell a world of
difference.
4. Ask for an official receipt.
Whether you like her or not,
let's help Kim Henares, BIR
Chief, do her job. This mere
slip of paper—a receipt—means

8. Keep the environment
clean.
This needs no explanation
and should apply to everyone
wherever they are.

more proof for the BIR to run
after those tax evaders.
5. Support local music, arts,
literature
Our race is filled with amazing talents and limitless creativity. We have brilliant singers who have reigned supreme
in various international competitions. We have local authors
who have their books translated in many languages and
visual artists who hold exhibits

9. Be a good leader.
Set a good example. Take the
words "public service" to heart.
Don't be tempted by untold
riches. Moral values, including dignity and credibility, are
qualities that would ripple in
eternity. It could even land you,
if you are really good, in history
books (an unintended effect, of
course).

in many parts of the world. Our
task is to support and patronize
them. Our own. Sariling atin.
6. Support local tourism.
Our country has so much to
offer than we can ever imagine.
Huwag maging dayuhan sa sariling bayan. Don't be a stranger
in your own country. Before
going out (or for overseas Filipinos, before thinking of visiting other countries), explore
the beauty of the Philippines.

10. Be a good parent.
A happy family is a happy society. Focus on your children.
Make sure you contribute positively to their lives and their futures. It is never too late.

The Lost Speech
Ninoy Aquino’s arrival speech he never read
BY CHING DEE
Philippine Canadian Inquirer

NINOY’S ARRIVAL SPEECH TRANSCRIPTION COURTESY OF THE
OFFICIAL GAZETTE (WWW.GOV.PH)

I have returned on my free will to join the ranks of those struggling to restore our
rights and freedoms through non-violence.

THE EDSA revolution—the
first one, to be more precise—
took place between February
22-25, 1986, almost three years
after Ninoy’s death. Led by his
dear wife, Cory Aquino, the
people took it to the streets and
sent the Marcos family (and
their posse) packing.
The revolution was broadcasted worldwide and inspired
so many people all over the
globe. It was dubbed the “People Power Revolution.”
Today, as we remember the
28th anniversary of the EDSA
People Power Revolution, we
commemorate one of its heroes.
Despite his absence, Ninoy
Aquino served as an inspiration
not just to his wife and family,
but to a grieving nation longing
for freedom and fighting for its
right.

I seek no confrontation. I only pray and will strive for a genuine national reconciliation
founded on justice.

The speech he never got to
read

The country is far advanced in her times of trouble. Economic, social and political problems bedevil the Filipino. These
problems may be surmounted if we are united. But we can be united only if all the rights and freedoms enjoyed before
September 21, 1972 are fully restored.

August 21, 1983 was more
than just a Sunday.
To some, it was the death of
democracy. The death of hope,
of liberty, of an end to tyranny.
To a few, it must have felt like
victory.
The late Senator Benigno
“Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was brutally assassinated that Sunday
just as he was emerging from
his plane at the tarmac of then
Manila International Airport. A
couple of shots were fired and
he fell from the plane. He was
dead on the spot.
Ninoy prepared a speech prior to his arrival. The speech he
never got to deliver.
According to his speech, he
came back to the country despite his mother’s advice after
being exiled in Boston, Massachusetts. He also knew back
then that he will be stepping
into darkness once more.
“I am prepared for the worst,
and have decided against the
advice of my mother, my spiritual adviser, many of my tested
friends and a few of my most
valued political mentors.
A death sentence awaits me.
Two more subversion charges,
both calling for death penalties,

I am prepared for the worst, and have decided against the advice of my mother, my
spiritual adviser, many of my tested friends and a few of my most valued political
mentors.
A death sentence awaits me. Two more subversion charges, both calling for death penalties, have been filed since I left
three years ago and are now pending with the courts.
Three years ago when I left for an emergency heart bypass operation, I hoped and prayed that the rights and freedoms
of our people would soon be restored, that living conditions would improve and that blood-letting would stop.
I could have opted to seek political asylum in America, but I feel it is my duty, as it is the duty of every Filipino, to suffer
with his people especially in time of crisis. I never sought not have I been given any assurances, or promise of leniency
by the regime. I return voluntarily armed only with a clear conscience and fortified in the faith that in the end, justice will
emerge triumphant. According to Gandhi, the willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent
tyranny that has yet been conceived by God and man.
Rather than move forward we have moved backward. The killings have increased, the economy has taken a turn for the
worse and the human rights situation has deteriorated.
During the martial law period, the Supreme Court heard petitions for habeas corpus. It is most ironic after martial law
has allegedly been lifted, that the Supreme Court last April ruled it can longer entertain petitions for habeas corpus for
person detained under the Presidential Commitment Order, which covers all so-called national security cases and which
under present circumstances can cover almost anything.

The Filipino asked for nothing more, but will surely accept nothing less, than all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by
the 1935 constitution – the most sacred legacies from the founding fathers.
Yes, the Filipino is patient, but there is a limit to his patience. Must we wait until that patience snaps?
The nationwide rebellion is escalating and threatens to explode into a bloody revolution. There is a growing cadre of
young Filipinos who have finally come to realize that freedom is never granted, it is taken. Must we relive the agonies
and the blood-letting of the past that brought forth our republic or can we sit down as brothers and sisters and discuss
our differences with reason and goodwill?
I have often wondered how many disputes could have been settled easily had the disputants only dared to define their terms.
So as to leave no room for misunderstanding, I shall define my terms:
Six years ago, I was sentenced to die before a firing squad by a military tribunal whose jurisdiction I steadfastly refused to
recognize. It is now time for the regime to decide. Order my immediate execution or set me free.
I was sentenced to die for allegedly being the leading communist leader. I am not a communist, never was and never will be.
National reconciliation and unity can be achieved, but only with justice, including justice for our Muslim and Ifugao brothers. There can be no deal with a dictator. No compromise with dictatorship.
In a revolution there can really be no victors, only victims. We do not have to destroy in order to build.
Subversion stems from economic, social, and political causes and will not be solved by purely military solution: It can be
curbed not with ever increasing repression but with a more equitable distribution of wealth, more democracy and more
freedom.
For the economy to get going once again, the working man must be given his just and rightful share or his labor, and to
the owners and managers must be restored the hope where there is so must uncertainty if not despair.
On one of the long corridors of Harvard University are carved in granite the words of Archibald Macleish: ‘How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms; by truth when it is attacked by lies; by democratic faith when it
is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always and in the final act, by determination and faith.’
I return from exile and an uncertain future with only determination and faith to offer – faith in our people and faith in God.”

❱❱ PAGE 30 The Lost

www.canadianinquirer.net

Seen & Scenes

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

FRIDAY 28

PAENG NEBRES IS REELECTED PRESIDENT OF
BICOL CANADA
Rafael Nebres was reelected president of the Bicol Canada Community
Association, Inc. (BCCA). A native of Camalig, Albay, he will be serving
until 2015.
The BCCA is composed of Bicolanos and Bicolanas who came from the
provinces of Albay, Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, Catanduanes, Masbate, and Sorsogon who opted to settle down in the different Canadian
provinces, cities, and towns.

LOVE & MUSIC
Philippine-based singer and pop balladeer Timmy Pavino, with the Rosario Strings and other special performers, serenaded their Valentine’s Day
guests during Timmy’s concert entitled Love & Music held at the Chandos
Pattison Auditorium in Surrey, B.C.. For the full story, please see page 32.

SHIFTING
GEOGRAPHY
Shifting Geography is a
new international ensemble dance creation under
the collaborative work
of Vancouver choreographer of Co.ERASGA,
Alvin Erasga Tolentino
and from Bonn, Germany
of CocoonDance, Rafaële
Giovanola.
This new dance explores
the body as a geographical metaphor with which to
inquire about one’s origin
and pathway, and in the
direction from which one
traverses to continue the
search of place, belonging, adapting and surviving
from the myriads of chaos
to self discovery.

MISS VALENTINE 2014
The Filipino-Canadian New Era Society of B.C. crowned Remie Delos
Reyes as Ms. Valentine 2014 at the Capri Hall on February 16. Several
February birthday celebrants, including Aning Hernandez, also graced
the occasion.

It will be held from February 18-22, 2014 at 8pm at
1895 Venables St. Vancouver. For ticket inquiries,
please call 604.251.1363
or visit www.thecultch.com.

Seen & Scenes

29 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

BLUEPRINT FOR CITIZENSHIP IMPROVEMENTS
Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Chris Alexander, delivered a keynote address on the Blueprint for Citizenship Improvements and participated in a question and answer period with members of the Richmond,
B.C. community. The event was held on February 17 and was organized
by the Intercultural Harmony Alliance and the Canadian Race Relations
Foundation.

CHINESE CULTURAL CENTRE PUBLIC MEETING
Stakeholders and different immigrant groups met on February 15 at the
Chinese Cultural Centre to discuss the provincial governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s apology
and to look at developing a common strategy on requesting a change
in the B.C. core curriculum. Artist and Vancouver Asian Heritage Month
Society (VAHMS) Vice President Esmie Gayo-Maclaren spoke on behalf of
the Filipino community.

SIR KA MILING SILVERIO CELEBRATED HIS
93RD BIRTHDAY
A surprise birthday party was given to Ka Miling by her daughters Marivit
Ramajo and Tessie Malonso. A number of close relatives and Rizal friends
were invited to celebrate his 93rd milestone with him in his Scarborough
home. Although he is physically weak, he enjoyed having everybody
around, recalling the happy occasions and celebrations he had with his
families and friends.
Emiliano R. Silverio was the first Rizal Toronto Chapter Commander in the
GTA and served as Canada Region Commander for 10 years. He is happy
to be informed and continue to be a part of the activities of the Knights
of Rizal in Toronto and all over Canada.

MERING MAURICIO HAD A SURPRISE
BIRTHDAY PARTY
The daughter and family of Mering Mauricio gave her a surprise luncheon party in a Scarborough restaurant to celebrate her recent birthday.
Her friends from St. Barnabas and Prince of Peace Parishes had a very
enjoyable lunch and wished her a Blessed and Happy Birthday.

www.canadianinquirer.net

Remembering Edsa

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

FRIDAY 30

The Lost...
have been filed since
I left three years ago
and are now pending
with the courts,” he wrote.
Yet in spite of those charges,
he decided to come back home
to set things right.
“I have returned on my free
will to join the ranks of those
struggling to restore our rights
and freedoms through non-violence. I seek no confrontation.
I only pray and will strive for a
genuine national reconciliation
founded on justice,” he said in
his speech.
Ninoy knew that “in a revolution there can really be no
victors, only victims. We do
not have to destroy in order to
build.” Hence, his peaceful approach.
He chose not to follow the
easy path even if he knew it
could cost him his life.
“I could have opted to seek
political asylum in America,
but I feel it is my duty, as it is the
duty of every Filipino, to suffer
with his people especially in
time of crisis. I never sought
❰❰ 27

nor have I been given any assurances, or promise of leniency
by the regime. I return voluntarily armed only with a clear
conscience and fortified in the
faith that in the end, justice will
emerge triumphant,” he said.
He longed to end the spilling
of more innocent blood in his
homeland. He mentioned in his
speech that the country moved
backward—into tyranny and
violence—rather than move
forward with the regime.
In his speech, Ninoy listed
the atrocities of Martial Law.
The deterioration of human
rights, the massive increase in
extrajudicial killings, twisted
laws, the suppression of free
speech and even businesses to
freely run, and the imprisonment of the innocent.
He pointed out that for a fallen economy such as the Philippines’ “to get going once again,”
owners must be given hope and
workers should be given their
fair share for their toils.
And then he called for unity.
“The country is far advanced

in her times of trouble. Economic, social and political
problems bedevil the Filipino.
These problems may be surmounted if we are united. But
we can be united only if all the
rights and freedoms enjoyed
before September 21, 1972 are
fully restored,” he pointed out.
“The Filipino asked for nothing more, but will surely accept
nothing less, than all the rights
and freedoms guaranteed by
the 1935 constitution—the
most sacred legacies from the
founding fathers.
Yes, the Filipino is patient,
but there is a limit to his patience. Must we wait until that
patience snaps?”
Apparently, yes. The Filipino’s patience was stretched to
the thinnest strand, until it can
no longer contain it and it exploded onto EDSA three years
later.
It seems like as if he has foreseen the revolution as proven
by his speech.
“The nationwide rebellion is
escalating and threatens to ex-

plode into a bloody revolution.
There is a growing cadre of young
Filipinos who have finally come
to realize that freedom is never
granted, it is taken,” he wrote.
And yet Ninoy longed to end
things in a non-violent manner, so he used his speech to
deliver his terms and to keep
everything peaceful and blackand-white despite knowing
that “there can be no deal with
a dictator. No compromise with
dictatorship.”
“Order my immediate execution or set me free.”
They said that a man who
has lived a full life is not afraid
to die. In his speech, he proved
that saying true.
In 1977, he was sentenced to
die before a firing squad by a
military tribunal for allegedly
being the nation’s communist
leader.
“I am not a communist, never
was and never will be,” Ninoy
wrote.
He said that “Subversion
stems from economic, social,
and political causes and will not

be solved by purely military solution: It can be curbed not with
ever increasing repression but
with a more equitable distribution of wealth, more democracy
and more freedom.”
Perhaps the government back
then was mistaking Ninoy’s
subversion with communism.
At the last part of his speech,
Ninoy quoted Archibald Macleish as written along the corridors of Harvard University.
“How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms; by truth when
it is attacked by lies; by democratic faith when it is attacked
by authoritarian dogma. Always
and in the final act, by determination and faith.”
And Ninoy added, “faith in
our people and faith in God."
A man’s legacy truly lives on
after he himself passes away.
He wrote, “According to Gandhi, the willing sacrifice of the
innocent is the most powerful
answer to insolent tyranny that
has yet been conceived by God
and man.” ■

PROGRAM RE-RUNS EVERY SUNDAY ON AM1470 AT 9:00PM – 10:00PM
Like Us on Facebook: Pinoy Juan Radio 96.1 | Follow Us On Twitter: JuanRadioCanada | Email
Us: juanradio96.1canada@yahoo.com
Want to be a Global Listener of Juan Radio 96.1? Simply DOWNLOAD Fairchild Radio (Vancouver) App on your Smart Phones and Computers and Experience Pinoy Juan Radio 96.1 FM
ANYWHERE…EVERYWHERE you may be!
www.canadianinquirer.net

DJ Babes “Ms B”
Newland

Irene “DJ I” Yatco

Gino Echavez

Remembering Edsa

31 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

The Ghost...
called for a snap election, one year before
the duly scheduled
elections.
The results declared Marcos
victorious, to cries of “FOUL!”
all across the land.
People took to the streets on
February 22, 1986; EDSA was
the melting pot of all collective woes, anger, and frustration. Generals, once loyal to
the strongman, defected; and
with them, their men in uniform. Clergy men and women
bore crosses and prayed rosaries; while intellectuals and artists gave speeches, sang songs,
wrote essays extolling the virtues of nationalism and love for
country.
Three days, the clamor continued, until he who sat on his
high wall had a great and decisive fall. Marcos, along with his
family, relinquished power and
fled in exile to Hawaiian shores.
The people were jubilant; a sea
of yellow frenzy.
Ninoy’s widow Corazon was
sworn into office as the country’s first female president.
Hope seemed to spring eternal, despite her self-confessed
lack of experience in any shape,
❰❰ 25

form, or fashion to fulfill the
highest call in the land.
The future seemed as bright
as the shade of canary yellow
which had become the colour of
the new movement.
Twenty seven years since,
I am all that much older, and
I am still a punk. Punk’s not
dead, I can say with conviction. But what of the spirit of
EDSA? Where has it all gone?
Forgotten, perhaps, like the
crimes of the former ousted
politician who yet again holds
a seat in government. Is the
spirit of EDSA, like punk, alive
still?
I am not as convinced.
The Ghost of EDSA Present
must be sitting in a dark corner
somewhere, bawling.
Pork, rice, and unbridled greed

Since the storied People’s
Power Movement took place on
EDSA 27 years ago, much has
happened to make me question
if the legacy still lives.
Pork and rice, for instance.
I refer, of course, not to our
favorite mouth-watering fare,
but to the notorious billion
peso pork barrel scam, and
to the infamous billion peso

“David Tan” rice smuggling
scandal. Pork and rice: a meal
prepared by unbridled greed,
at the expense of the Filipino
people. These are but two examples in a whole gamut of
them.
Where do we, the people,
factor into the recipe? I am
no scholar on the matter, but
it would seem that we have
played the role of the “powerless and clueless” very, very
well. In complete anti-thesis to
the vigilance and initiative of
“People Power.”
We cannot live off one spectacular moment in time, and
then slip back into our oblivious, routinary existence.
We are too forgiving, and
far too forgetful. We elect the
same-old-same-old into office;
blinded by smooth talking and
lofty ideals or bought by crispy
bills.
The plight of our country, and
I am sorry to say it, is pitiful. All
these reports on the “economic
recovery” that we are supposedly enjoying have yet to translate to concrete terms, for good
of the common man and woman; such as the taxi driver and
myself.

“AKO” ay Pilipino

Where do we begin to unravel
the hopelessly tangled knot of a
country we have become?
It all starts with the part you
and I play in the knot.
What can I do to make it better, one person at a time? I am
not talking of the empty nationalism we all-too-often see; the
kind that gets their underwear
in a bunch and goes all ballistic
on social media when someone
says something nasty about
the Philippines or a Filipino,
yet the same kind that thinks
nothing of tossing their litter
onto the streets of an already
dirty metro. Folks, there is a
reason we have been likened to
the gates of hell, and you would
have to be blind, living under a
rock, or in absolute denial not
to see it. So instead of expending effort railing against those
who point out the truth, let’s do
what we can to fix it.
I am referring to the nationalism that takes ACTIVE RESPONSIBILITY for our own
actions in the country we claim
to love so very much. Littering.
Driving like a moron. Paying
off the cop who catches you for
driving like a moron. Refusing

to fall in line and shoving your
way into the bus or the railway
transit. Not paying your employees fair wages for their labour. Not paying on time. Not
paying them at all. Treating
your helpers like slaves, instead
of workers with dignity. Putting-up with all the garbage (literal and figurative) the government passes off as good service.
Electing former criminals into
office. The list of areas in which
we all fall short goes on and on.
Time to set the cogs into motion, and bring about a true revolution in our country; the kind
of revolution that begins with
self: “AKO.” It begins with self
and ripples all across the land
into something more solid than
the mere memory of a fantastic
3-day event in our history.
Ninoy said that the “Filipino
is worth dying for.” Is he or she
also worth living for? Can we
love our individual lives in a
manner worthwhile and worthy
of the price that many a bygone
hero and heroine have paid?
I would like to believe that the
answer is a resounding “YES.”
So would the cab driver, I am
guessing. As would the Ghost of
EDSA Future, I am certain. ■

LAST FRIDAY’S red carpet
event “Love & Music” Valentine’s Day Concert did not fall
short of double G’s (glitz &
glamour), surprises, frenzy and
sterling array of amazing young
talents. For those who came to
watch amidst hundred-andone reasons for others not to, it
was one Valentine’s date night
to remember. Their loss, our
utmost gain.
The main act and emerging
shining star, TIMMY PAVINO,
did not disappoint. If anything, he gets better each time.
One can never have enough of
Timmy’s polished, soothing
chops. His akin lounge-style
of performance is no put on.
He’s naturally gifted with gab.
Finding his comfort zone and
enthusiasm in conveying messages of love and yearning not
by mere melodic rhythm, but
by intertwining this with his
thought-provoking words of
wisdom. For a young man of 20some, Timmy Pavino has fully
aged to perfection. His Barry
Manilow medley was the best I
have heard yet so far, not even
from overtures of more established Filipino performers. And
his Michel Legrand ditty rendition did top my favourites for
the night.
Featured young artist, Glisha dela Cruz, was a revela-

tion. During rehearsals she
came in with an unassuming
flair of a typical teenager who
was tasked to dish out a tune
with Timmy of a famous Jose
Mari Chan-Regine Velasquez
1970’s classic hit, “Please Be
Careful With My Heart”. The
result was splendid. Glisha
simply came out from her shell
and nailed her part. With what
I’ve seen, that was the official
launch of Glisha’s career in local entertainment. She is a total package in the making—talent, beauty, good bearing and
right attitude all rolled into
one.
No one else could be prouder
that night than Glisha’s doting parents, a.k.a. generous
and beloved producers behind
“Love & Music” Valentine’s Day
Concert—Joel and Narima dela
Cruz of Glisten Productions.
I caught up with them shortly
before the show. And they both
quipped, “whatever happens,
we will make sure that this
is going to be one Valentine’s
Day concert in Vancouver that
will be remembered for a long,
long time. We are believers/
supporters of great Filipino talents. We did not falter in asking
Timmy to be the star of our new
production venture’s maiden
offering”.
Bravo! This couple definitely
has good taste. From opening
acts up till closing, it was hard
to leave my seat for anything.
Proud of Timmy Pavino and
the journey that has taken him.
Went home fulfilled sans disappointments and doubts. ■

Timmy Pavino with Glisha dela Cruz.

Entertainment

33 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Luis and Angel, in a
relationship again
BY KATHERINE MARFAL-TEVES
Philippine Canadian Inquirer

Iwa Moto and Pampy Lacson, with Thirdy (middle).

PHOTO FROM WHYNOTCOCONUT.COM

Jodi Sta. Maria says son
gets along with Iwa Moto
BY MARINEL R. CRUZ
Philippine Daily Inquirer
ACTRESS JODI Sta. Maria says her son
with estranged husband Pampi Lacson
is getting along well with the latter’s new
partner, Iwa Moto.
“Everything is OK now. Pampi and I
worked this out, not for ourselves but
for our son (Thirdy). We don’t want him
to grow up conflicted,” Jodi told entertainment writers during her launch recently as the face of the “Alagang Flawless” campaign. “It doesn’t matter who
made the first move and [apologized].
What’s important is that all is well now,
for Thirdy’s sake.”

has tears when she cries.’ He’s so cute!”
The actress pointed out that Pampi is
a responsible father. “He loves our son
and I never worry when Thirdy is with
him. Hindi siya nagkulang. And he really
makes time for the boy, especially when
he is needed in school.”
She was cautious when discussing
Thirdy’s relationship with her boyfriend, Bacoor Vice Gov. Jolo Revilla.
“Thirdy calls him tito (uncle). It’s clear
to Thirdy who Jolo is to him. I don’t
want my son to be confused about the
role of his dad and that of the person I
am with.” She added, “Pampi is always
[accessible to Thirdy]. I don’t want to
cause him any disrespect. He and Jolo
both know where they stand.”

More comfortable

Not prepared

Jodi and Pampi announced their separation in March 2011 and filed for annulment shortly after. The “Be Careful
With My Heart” star said Thirdy is now
more comfortable around Iwa, who gave
birth to a baby girl in September.
Frequent visitor

“Thirdy visits them often. I have never
heard him say anything negative about
[Iwa],” Jodi said. “[Iwa and I] don’t communicate regularly. I’ve seen Thirdy’s
baby sister only in photos. He’s crazy
about her. I constantly remind him to be
a good kuya.”
Jodi said she never kept the reason
for the breakup from her 8-year-old
son. “He’s a smart kid. Not for a single
moment did I underestimate his understanding of things. I patiently explain
things to him whenever he asks. I will
not go into the details, but I sit down and
talk with him.”
She discovered interesting things
about Thirdy when he became a big
brother [to Baby Eve], Jodi said. “He’s so
loving and thoughtful, laging nakadikit
sa baby. He tells me about her. Recently,
he said, ‘Mom, my baby sister already

Talk has it that the annulment case
will soon be decided. Jodi refused to
confirm this. “I will answer questions
about my annulment at the proper
time,” she stressed.
She is emotionally unprepared to get
married again, Jodi pointed out. “Jolo
knows this. We talk about my dreams
and aspirations—marriage is not yet one
of them. He sees how well my career is
going, and understands that I shouldn’t
waste any opportunities right now.”

LUIS MANZANO and Angel Locsin are
together again.
“I’m proudly her boyfriend,” Luis said
in an interview on “Buzz ng Bayan” on
Sunday, February 16.
He added that the reconciliation happened just a few days after New Year’s
Day—and as they say—the rest is history.
After a few text messages, the nowcouple started to bring back the flame
again.
It will be recalled that last January 15
in an interview with ABS-CBN News,
Angel surprised the public when she admitted that she’s still in love with Luis.
Meanwhile, Luis clarified the rumors
that Angel made the first move in their
reconciliation. “Some people believe I
had no idea when she first came out on
TV and said mahal niya ako (she loves
me), that it was our first time to talk after
so long. That’s wrong. We were already
talking, we were already spending time
with each other, we were already enjoy-

The road to reconcilation

“It all started a few days after Christmas. I don’t even think if I got to greet
her for Christmas. Nabati ko ang family
nya ( I greeted her family). A few days
after Christmas, that’s when we started
texting again. Very simple lang. Greeting lang. New year, pumunta ako sa bahay nila (I went to their house on New
Year),” Luis recounted.
He denied that he was the cause of the
breakup of Angel and Phil Younghusband, explaining that they didn’t have
any form of communication for several
years.
The TV host-actor also cleared that Angel didn’t cause his breakup with actress
Jennylyn Mercado. “Jen and I know the
real reason why we broke up. Our families
know the real reason why we broke up. She
(Angel) was not a factor in the breakup.”
As for their rumored wedding plans,
Luis didn’t give a clear answer—but
hinted that it could happen a few years
from now. ■

Premiums are based on “STANDARD” 10 Year Term Single Life Rates. Based on your current
health status and family history, you MAY qualify for further discounts on your premiums.
20 Year Term, 30 Year Term, Whole Life and Universal Life Plans also available!

Prayers for him

As Jolo’s girlfriend, Jodi said, she
shows support by “praying for him and
his family.” The Revillas are the subject
of public scrutiny, with the alleged involvement of Jolo’s father, Sen. Ramon
“Bong” Revilla Jr., in the P10-billion
pork barrel scam.
“Praying for them is the best I can do.
I hope they overcome this trial. Jolo
knows I’m here for him, especially if he
needs someone to talk to. I offer him a
shoulder to cry on,” she said. “It’s true,
he’s been emotional lately. This is not
unusual for a person going through a
lot.” ■

ing each other’s company again,” he explained.

***Renewing Your existing Term policy - Call us first to get you better rates***
Get your FREE NO Obligation Quote! Call now!

Deniece Cornejo denies being an escort
BY JAYMEE T. GAMIL
Philippine Daily Inquirer
MANILA, PHILIPPINES—Saying she
wanted “to educate the Filipino people
who are trying to undermine my character,” alleged rape victim Deniece Cornejo has denied rumors that she was in the
escort service industry.
“I have never been employed in any
club as an escort,” Cornejo said in an email sent on Sunday to the Philippine
Daily Inquirer. Reports about her being a call girl started circulating after
the Malaysian man who let her stay in
his condominium unit for free said that
they first met at a club.
The admission was made by Greg Binunus in an affidavit he submitted to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), which
was looking into the cases filed by TV hostcomedian Vhong Navarro against Cornejo.
Cornejo and Navarro hogged the headlines after both made allegations and
counter-allegations against each other.
Cornejo claimed that during a visit to
her condo unit at Forbeswood Heights in
Taguig City on Jan. 22, the TV host tried to
rape her but her friends led by businessman Cedric Lee and his sister, Bernice, arrived in the nick of time to stop him.

Navarro, on the other hand, accused
Lee and seven others of mauling him
and framing him for rape so that they
could extort money from him.
In her e-mail, Cornejo explained how
she met Binunus, the former tenant of
the condo unit where the alleged rape
and the mauling of Navarro occurred.
“I met Mr. Greg through a girl who
purchased goods from me. She happened to work at a piano bar. She gave
Mr. Greg my number, hoping that he
would purchase goods from me in order
for her to get a commission,” she said.
Cornejo, a model and styling consultant,
sells fashion items online.
“During my meeting with Mr. Greg, he
also discussed his other projects. He mentioned that he was opening a Southeast
Asian restaurant … in the Fort and asked me
to be an endorser and [to also] help him [in]
branding and management since I am a hospitality management student,” she added.
At that time, Cornejo said she was
looking for a condo unit since most of
her meetings, auditions and commercials were in Makati.
According to her, Binunus told her
that he used to stay in a unit at Bonifacio Global City where he still had two
months of rent left. He explained that he
left because the unit had been robbed.

PHOTO COURTESY OF DENIECE CORNEJO

“I then decided to stay in that unit [on] a
short-term basis while looking for a more
accessible place in exchange for helping
him in his business,” Cornejo said.
She stated in her e-mail that she decided to explain the situation because
people were attacking her character.
“Victim-blaming is a very common
practice throughout the world especially for rape victims: ‘She was dressed
provocatively. She had a bad reputation.
She should have known better than to
put herself in that situation,’” she added.
Cornejo went on to quote a study conducted by the Canadian Women’s Foundation in which 20 percent of respondents blamed women for inviting sexual
assault by being drunk, wearing short
skirts or flirting.
She also quoted statistics from the

Rape Abuse, and Incest National Network, which stated that “victim-blaming
is one of the main reasons that women
do not want to report rape.”
“And this is why I bought this laptop,
in order to do my research on the matter aside from continuing to do my creative work in fashion and design. I find it
hard to believe that buying a laptop with
a video-editing software has anything to
do with me being raped,” Cornejo said.
The NBI earlier reported that it was
looking into a report that she bought a
laptop computer with video editing software in a Quezon City store on Jan. 26. It
said that Cornejo later asked the condo
management if she could see the footage taken by their closed circuit television camera to help her find some items
which she lost. ■

Arnel readies all-originals album
BY MARINEL R. CRUZ
Philippine Daily Inquirer
JOURNEY FRONTMAN Arnel Pineda
said he would soon come out with an
all-original album to show Filipinos his
“other side.”
“I’ve been working on my own songs
since last year. Journey tours every year;
however, this album will have songs different from what the band normally
plays, but it will still be rock. It’s been
my kind of music since I joined my first
band at 15,” Pineda said, adding that the
tunes would tackle love, social issues
and personal experiences.
His single, “This Christmas,” has
been available on iTunes since December. Two more songs, “Paumanhin” and
“Ewan Ko Ba,” are up for release soon.
“I release one song at a time,” he said.
That’s how local artists deal with piracy
these days—if you release them all at the
same time, you’d see bootleg copies on
the streets soon after.”
Possible visit

During his launch as ambassador for
the “Win Against Asthma Today” campaign organized by healthcare company
www.canadianinquirer.net

GlaxoSmithKline, Pineda also hinted at
the possibility of Journey revisiting Manila this year.
The American rock band is scheduled
to tour the United States and Canada
from May 14 to September. “We’ll be doing 55 shows in all,” he told the INQUIRER. “We might come to Asia around
mid-October. Our supporters in Japan
are requesting for us to perform there.
Since we’ll be in the region, [we’re thinking,] we might as well visit the Philippines.”
Pineda also reported that his bandmates, with the help of his newly formed
Arnel Pineda Foundation Inc., were able
to raise $350,000 for “Yolanda” survivors. “It is still being discussed which
projects and institutions the fund will go
to,” Pineda pointed out. “I’m so pleased
that my friend, (singer) Martin Nievera,
decided to join in.”
Aside from spreading awareness on
fighting asthma, Pineda said he visited
children’s hospitals and distributed
medicines to those afflicted with hydrocephalus. “It’s a serious illness that I
think the government should look into…
I hope foundations created to help sick
kids will be able to give more,” the singer
stressed.

TORONTO—Hayden
Christensen says it was “quite the
adventure” filming the period
piece “Outcast” in China—an
experience that was heightened
by his co-star Nicolas Cage.
The Vancouver-born actor of
“Star Wars” fame said he was in
and around Beijing for nearly
four months shooting the action movie which is set in the
12th century.
“We were filming out in the
rural countryside for the most
part and some incredible environments. And then working
with Nic Cage was a real treat,”
Christensen said in a recent
phone interview.
“He's everything that you expect and more. A super, super
nice guy and one of the most
professional actors I've ever
gotten to work with.”
Christensen said that he and
Cage portray knights from the
Crusades in the film. When
the Canadian star first crossed
paths with the Oscar winner,
Cage already appeared well
on his way towards being immersed in his on-screen role.
“First time I met him, he was
full on in character and didn't
break character for the first
couple of weeks,” Christensen
recalled. “He did a full-on English accent, he had like this
wound on one eye, so he was
walking around with one eye
shut all of the time....
“(He's) just a very dedicated
guy. Showed up, he knew all of
his lines for the entire movie
before we started filming. Just
incredibly prepared, and it was
really cool to get to work with
him because I was a fan.”
Christensen dabbled in fashion with a recent collaboration with homegrown retailer
RW&Co. A 20-piece capsule
collection released last year
was inspired by time Christensen spent at his Ontario
farm during the holiday season. But the 32-year-old—who
has starred in films including
“Shattered Glass,” “Jumper”

BY JESSICA HERNDON
The Associated Press

Hayden Christensen.

and “Awake”—appears poised
for a return to the big screen.
In addition to shooting the recent project with Cage, he is set
appear alongside yet another
Oscar winner, joining Adrien
Brody in “American Heist.”
Filmed in New Orleans, Christensen said the pair portray
brothers who get caught up with
the wrong crowd and “decide it's
a good idea to go rob a bank.”
“It's a heist movie with some
action elements, but it's very
much a character-driven drama
that's really about the relationship between these two brothers,” said Christensen. “I think
that relationship is really what
the movie is about.”
Christensen catapulted to international fame with his starring role as Anakin Skywalker
in two of the “Star Wars” prequels: 2002's”Episode II - Attack of the Clones” and “Episode III - Revenge of the Sith,”
which was released in 2005.
The storied sci-fi franchise
will be revived once again with
the Walt Disney Co. producing
a new “Star Wars” trilogy set
to take place after the original
three space epics.

PHOTO BY HELGA ESTEB / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

J.J. Abrams—director of two
recent big-screen adaptations
of the “Star Trek” franchise—
will be helming the first film
in the new “Star Wars” series.
Shooting for “Star Wars: Episode VII”' is slated to begin this
spring and is due for release in
2015. Original “Star Wars” stars
Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill
and Carrie Fisher are expected to play smaller, supporting
roles in the new movie.
“I think it's in good hands,”
said Christensen of the scifi film series reboot.”I think
they're going to take the franchise probably into a new direction. I'm not really involved, so
I wish them the best.
“I saw George Lucas not too
long ago, and he's definitely
moving on to a new phase of his
life,” Christensen added in reference to the famed “Star Wars”
creator, who remarried last year
and also welcomed a baby girl.
“It will be interesting to see
what Disney does with it, and
what J.J. does with the first
film.” ■
With files from The Associated
Press
www.canadianinquirer.net

LOS ANGELES—In an awards
season that seems to have a ceremony for every facet of filmmaking, the Make-up and Hair
Stylists Guild awards returned
after a 10-year hiatus with an
award for Johnny Depp.
The actor received the first
ever distinguished artisan
award for his work in films like
“Edward Scissorhands,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”
and “Alice in Wonderland.”
Depp’s honour was presented
by his long-time collaborator
and makeup artist Joel Harlow,
who is nominated for an Academy Award this year for makeup in “The Lone Ranger.” Depp
also starred in the film.
“This is a great honour, but
glancing up at the screen I realize what a ridiculous thing
I’ve done,” joked Depp while
accepting his trophy after clips
of his work were shown at Paramount Studios theatre on Saturday evening.
“I mean seriously, why do
they still give me jobs?” he added. “I’ve done a lot of things...I
should probably apologize for a
few, but I won’t.”
Praising the work of the
makeup artists who’ve helped
him “find the root of each character,” the soft-spoken actor
said he liked when his face was
moulded in “A Nightmare on
Elm Street.”
“I found, oddly, that I liked
being encased in all of that
stuff,” he said. “I try something
different each time as an actor
with the amazing help of makeup artists who have made my
whole career.”
Resembling the boozy party that is the Golden Globes
rather than the formal Oscars,
the makeup and hair stylists
awards, which honours the
best in the business from film
to television, was a reunion for
the behind-the-scenes artists.
Squeals echoed throughout

the auditorium as artists with
multi-colored hair and thick
cat-eye style makeup hugged
and kissed.
“It’s our circle or little family’s time to celebrate,” said
Harlow prior to the ceremony.
As an ode to visual effects,
a woman painted white and
dressed in white stood in the
lobby balancing a large headpiece made of flowers as she
was lit by green lights. Host
Tom Arnold later joked she
looked “edible, like a big white
cake.”
There to present the award
for best contemporary hair styling to the stylists for “Lee Daniels’ the Butler,” best supporting actress Oscar nominee June
Squibb called the green lighting
“wild.” Turns out she loves the
colour. She’s even asked Tadashi Shoji to make her a green
dress for Oscar night. “I’ve seen
a sketch and it’s wonderful!”
she added.
Some of the evening’s other
awards went to Oscar nominees
“Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa” for best special makeup effects and “Dallas Buyers Club”
for best period and/or character makeup, while best contemporary hair styling in a television series went to “The Voice.”
Makeup artist Dick Smith
and hairstylist Gail Ryan received lifetime achievement
awards.
Jane Lynch, Ed Asner,
Johnny Knoxville, Nicollette
Sheridan and Melissa Leo were
among the presenters at the
charming awards show that
even included the engagement
of a gay couple.
“Just have fun, that’s all this
is about,” said Sue Cabral-Ebert, president of the Make-up
Artists and Hair Stylists Guild.
“It’s not brain surgery.”
Could a gaffers and grips gala
be next?
“You should see the electrical
staff’s awards,” joked Arnold.
“It’s madness!”
The Oscar ceremony will take
place March 2. ■

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

36

Lifestyle

‘Pilates in business class’

In Clinical Pilates, you learn to wake up your ‘sleeping muscles’ to
heal and prevent injuries
BY ANNE A. JAMBORA
Philippine Daily Inquirer
THEY’RE A group of specialized
physiotherapists and movement
specialists trained to incorporate Pilates in rehabilitating injuries and chronic pain.
They build relationships with
their patients, becoming extra sensitive to their mood and
behavioral changes, encouraging them to keep on going but,
more importantly, also knowing when to set restrictions.
This is physical rehab, 21st-century style. This is Clinical Pilates.
“It’s Pilates in business class .
This is a highly specialized discipline. We provide first-rate rehab
service based on principles that
are grounded on scientific studies. We make sure everything is
positive here. The muscles need
to be activated, but emotions have
to be corrected, as well,” said Ole
Eugenio, founder and program
director of Options Studio.
Eugenio is also the co-designer of last year’s successful Core
Suspend, an exercise program
that is now a recognized education provider by the American
Council on Exercise.
Partnering with one of the
country’s top sports and celebrity
chiropractors, Dr. Anton Cancio,
Options Studio opened the country’s first and only Clinical Pilates
rehab program this year at the 3/F
101 Connecticut cor. Missouri Sts.
in Greenhills, San Juan, just above
Cancio’s clinic, Cancio Chiropractic. It is open Monday to Saturday,
6 a.m.-9 p.m.
Under the guidance of Cancio, the therapists—all fitnessand Pilates-certified trainers—adjust the Pilates program
according to the doctor’s instructions. These instructions
are mostly composed of what
patients should not be doing
during a movement.
Synergy

“Pilates has allowed my pa-

tients to hold their adjustments
longer because the muscles become stronger. It really wakes
up those ‘sleeping muscles,’
those we don’t normally address,” Cancio said.
There’s a synergy between the
muscle, the joints and the spine,
Cancio said. When he aligns the
spine, for instance, the muscles
have to work together to support it well. When the wrong
muscles are fired or if an imbalance of muscle strength from
misguided training happens—
and this is usually the case when
patients go from rehab straight
to their gym instructors—the
alignment won’t hold long, the
pain returns and they come back
for more treatment.
To avoid this cycle, Cancio
decided to open a studio above
his clinic. It has always been his
plan to open a wellness center
that can provide high-quality
professional service under one
roof. Options Studio was the
perfect partner of choice.
For patients who are not
ready to go into full-on one-onone fitness training, Clinical
Pilates will give them a guided
and controlled type of rehab
that will someday take them to
their fitness goals.
“I don’t really like it when
patients come back to me, in
pain, after a treatment. ‘Doc, I
don’t know if I pushed myself
too hard or if my trainer did
it wrong.’ There’s always that
injury, nursing it, and then fitness. You can’t go from injury
to fitness,” Cancio said.
With a team of specialists,
patients can look forward to
avoiding that cycle. Instructors
report to Cancio before and after each session. This way, he
stays constantly updated with
their programs.
Patients who enroll in the
program include those with
slipped discs, shoulder pain,
scoliosis, knee injury, osteoporosis and osteoarthritis,
chronic bad posture that leads

to neck pain, prenatal and postnatal problems like back pain,
athletes with sports-specific
conditions, or those seeking to
improve performance in sports
like golf, tennis, basketball,
football and running.
Cancio said Clinical Pilates
can bring down a 38-degree
scoliosis curve, for instance,
to 30 degrees or less. Although
scoliosis can never be fully corrected, by restoring balance
and bringing the muscles to
optimum health, the structure
is able to move, since the spine
and joints now offer better mobility, he said.

Lean forward with fly

Daily function

“Ours is a program that can
restore daily function. With
the awareness and willingness
of the patient to improve, we
can write them a very good program suited to their needs. We
provide the inspiration, but at
the end of the day it’s really up
to the patients,” Eugenio said.
Clinical Pilates does not
use conventional weights like
those found in gyms or rehab
centers. Instead, it uses Pilates
equipment like Tower Trainers,
stability chairs, reformers, suspension ropes, stability balls—
equipment that encourages
three-dimensional training.
The springs in these machines, for instance, perform
much better than traditional
weights like dumbbells. They
resemble more closely muscle
contractions, emphasizing concentric and eccentric contraction to prevent injuries.
The more you press, the more
you’ll be working against the
resistance, Eugenio said. The
even tension throughout the
entire movement makes it more
effective, increasing strength
faster and more effectively.
With suspension ropes, patients need to stabilize them
first before they can execute a
movement properly.
“We don’t go deeper into the

Midback series

motor learning of the muscle.
When you get injured, your
muscle firing pattern will be
changed, and that’s why you develop some tightness. There’s
an abnormal muscle firing pattern. And this is what we’re correcting,” Eugenio said.
But it’s not all about adjustment and strength-building.
Eugenio said there are some
functions that cannot be corrected by exercise alone. And
here’s where Cancio Chiropractic myotherapy comes in.
Myotherapy is a manual
therapy that combines different
customized massage techniques
that focuses on problem areas in
the muscle, such as chronic trigger points, scar tissue, nodules,
tightness/stiffness and muscle
spasms. These problem areas
can all cause referred pain to
other areas of the body. Myotherapy isolates these trouble
spots and frees up the muscle so
it regains flexibility and allows
normal muscle function.
“It’s the integration of the
whole body when you do a
movement. Unlike doing bicep
curls, for example, you move

just the bicep. In Pilates, you
learn to stabilize the core to be
able to do a movement more efficiently while protecting your
back,” Eugenio said.
Cancio said the core is not
just about the abdominals, although that’s what many people
know from coveting those sixpack abs they see in magazines.
The core includes the pelvis,
hip muscles and glutes.
“The reason we don’t get injured is because, even before we
move, for a few milliseconds, the
core is engaged to protect the
spine. This we learn even as babies. We don’t consciously think
about it now. But when you’re
sedentary or have just given
birth, those core muscles become weak and no longer engage
prior to movement. So you get a
back pain when you pick up an
object from the floor,” he said.
By activating the core muscles
and small muscles in the spine
with resistance, patients will relearn to switch on those muscles.
Through repeated feedback to
the mind and body, patients will
gain muscle memory until it becomes an automatic response. ■

Lifestyle

37 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Vancouver Diversity
Health Fair Celebrates
10 Years With A Focus
on Healthy Families
VANCOUVER,
BC—On
Saturday,
March 1, 2014, one of the most dynamic
multicultural events in the Lower Mainland celebrates a decade of promoting
health and wellness to Vancouver’s diverse community.
AMSSA is hosting the 10th Annual
Vancouver Diversity Health Fair at the
Croatian Cultural Centre (3250 Commercial Drive, Vancouver). The theme
of this milestone event is Promoting
Family Health. There is no cost to attend or to participate in the day's events,
which run from 10AM - 3PM; opening
ceremonies begin at 9:30AM.
Over the past ten years this event has
evolved into the largest event of its kind
in Canada. It opens doors for cultural
groups who often don’t know how to
access health services in our country or
make their needs known, by promoting
physical and emotional well-being in a
comfortable, fun and easily-accessible
environment. Over 80 volunteers make
this day possible, including those offering translation services in Cantonese, French, Korean, Vietnamese, Farsi,
Punjabi, Spanish, Mandarin and other
languages.
Guests will have access to free health
and wellness resources including more
than 50 exhibitors, 10 onsite health
screenings such as blood pressure testing and ask a Nurse/Dietician services.
The popular Healthy Cooking Stage will
feature cooking demonstrations with
Chef Gerry Kasten from Vancouver
Coastal Health, Thi Bui of Fraser Health,
Chef Trevor Randle from Agriculture in
the Classroom and Chef Instructor at

Maple Ridge Secondary School and Chef
Siddhartha Choudhary from Siddhartha's Indian Kitchen.
New additions and long-time favourites in the Healthy Families Activity Zone include: Family Yoga with Yoga
Buttons, Gymnastics Tumble with BC
Gymnastics, Fun With Food with Vancouver Farmers Market, Soccer with
MoreSports, Active Art with Vancouver
Parks and Bring Back Play with ParticipACTION. This year’s entertainment
stage includes performances by Science
World, Zumba Vancouver, Estilo Cubano and more.
The 10th Annual Vancouver Diversity
Health Fair welcomes the support of
Travelsmart, who is encouraging guests
to travel to the event via transit. They
will be hosting a free bike valet at this
year’s event, as well as presenting gifts
to the first 300 guests to provide the
transit ticket they used to get to the Fair.
Food trucks (Arturo Mexico To Go,
Culver City Salads, San Juan Family Food Truck) will be on-site for those
who wish to purchase lunch.
For more information please visit
www.amssa.org/healthfair2014. Representatives are available for interviews in
several languages.
AMSSA is an affiliation of over 80
member agencies providing immigrant
settlement and multicultural services
in over 25 communities throughout BC.
They provide leadership in advocacy and
education for anti-racism, human rights
and social justice, supporting its members in serving immigrants, refugees and
culturally diverse communities. ■

www.canadianinquirer.net

Lifestyle

FEBRUARY 21, 2014 FRIDAY 38

Study: Saliva test may help
predict which teenage boys will
later develop major depression
BY MARIA CHENG
The Associated Press

Ruby Tuason.

PHOTO FROM TV5.COM.PH

Ruby Tuason shows ’em
how to handle men
BY THELMA SIOSON SAN
JUAN
Philippine Daily Inquirer
WHY SHOULD one be surprised that when table chatter
turns to Ruby Tuason these
days, it’s not so much the pork
barrel issue that Manila gossip
dwells on, but another interesting detail of the socialite’s life?
The plunder case suspect,
who asked to turn state witness
in the Janet Napoles pork barrel scam, is described by friends
as a feisty woman who, when
she caught her husband cheating on her, dumped all his stuff
on the front yard—including his
“Gucci shoes,” a woman friend
says—and burned them.
Her hubby, the late Butch Tuason, came home just in time to
see the bonfire. But had he come
a few minutes earlier, he could
have been thrown into the fire,
too, the friend adds, in jest.
Over lunch, the friend also
recalls, in passing, how Ruby’s
sleuthing on her husband’s peccadilloes would crack them up—
“like she would stake out the
apartment where she believed
her husband kept his mistress,
and with a megaphone to call
out to them!”
Nooo, we all chorus at the table; you must be exaggerating.
No, this female friend swears.
“But I learned a lot from her on
how to handle a man. She really
loved him, and [vice versa]. An
interesting love story.”
In the end, her friends say,
Ruby was around to attend to

her husband’s wake and funeral.
While they also point out that
Butch was the love of her life,
he wasn’t her first husband. She
was Mrs. Laygo (she has two
sons with him) before she was
free to marry Butch in Vegas.
(Some friends of Butch’s first
wife, however, claim that Butch
and his first wife, Vicky Preysler,
stayed officially married.)
At that lunch, we also learn
that Ruby and her sister Mercedes (who would die of cancer)—their family name is
Chan—did well in the late
1980s buying and placing TV
ads for the Louie Beltran show
“Straight From the Shoulder,”
which ran in those years, and
media-buying for Nestlé, also
in those years.
Butch’s first wife, Vicky
Preysler, is the sister of Isabel
Preysler, the Manila-born socialite who has become a highprofile celebrity in Europe and
a favorite cover of “Hola!” Isabel’s also known as the first wife
of Julio Iglesias and the mother
of Enrique Iglesias.
Ruby’s friends recall how Julio would hang out with Ruby
and Butch whenever he was
here in those good old days.
But if Ruby was a fighter
for her man, she is also a good
homemaker, her friends say. She
is a good cook, who’s known for
her puttanesca and her prawns
in coconut and aligue sauce.
This plunder suspect/state
witness/socialite/bonfire maker also prays the rosary, the novena and visits the Blessed Sacrament every day, they say. ■

LONDON—A saliva test for
teenage boys with mild symptoms of depression could help
identify those who will later develop major depression, a new
study says.
Researchers measured the
stress hormone cortisol in
teenage boys and found that
ones with high levels coupled
with mild depression symptoms were up to 14 times more
likely to suffer clinical depression later in life than those with
low or normal cortisol levels.
The test was tried on teenage
boys and girls, but found to be
most effective with boys.
About one in six people suffer from clinical depression at
some point in their lives, and
most mental health disorders
start before age 24. There is
currently no biological test to
spot depression.
“This is the emergence of a
new way of looking at mental
illness,” Joe Herbert of the University of Cambridge and one of
the study authors said at a news
conference on Monday. “You
don’t have to rely simply on
what the patient tells you, but
what you can measure inside
the patient,” he said.
Herbert compared the
new test to ones done
for other health problems, such as heart
disease, which evaluate things such
as cholesterol and
high blood sugar
to determine a
p a t i e n t ’s
risk.

www.canadianinquirer.net

Herbert and colleagues at the
University of Cambridge observed more than 1,800 teenagers aged 12 to 19 and examined
their cortisol levels with saliva
tests. The researchers also collected the teens’ own reports
of depression symptoms and
tracked diagnoses of mental
health disorders in them for up
to three years later.
The boys who had high cortisol levels and mild depression
symptoms were up to 14 times
more likely to suffer from clinical depression when compared
to other teens with normal levels, while girls with similarly
elevated cortisol levels were
only up to four times more
likely to develop the condition.
The study was paid for by the
Wellcome Trust and the results
were published online Monday
in the journal Proceedings of
the National Academies of Science.
Experts suggested that cortisol might affect boys and girls
differently.
“All hormones, including
sexual hormones, influence
brain function and behaviour,”
said
D r.

Carmine Pariante, a professor
of biological psychiatry at the
Institute of Psychiatry at King’s
College London. He was not
linked to the study.
Pariante said the genderspecific hormones—androgen
for males and estrogen and progesterone for females—might
react differently to cortisol and
could explain the difference in
risk for teenage boys and girls.
Pariante said the saliva test
was promising and could help
target psychological help such
as talk therapy for boys at risk
of developing depression. Scientists are increasingly searching for physical markers in the
body of psychiatric illnesses instead of relying exclusively on
a diagnosis based on a patient
consultation.
“This gives us a biological
model to understand mental
health problems the way we understand other medical conditions,” he said, comparing it to
how doctors might diagnose a
broken leg based on an X-ray or
identify heart disease patients
based on high blood pressure
or cholesterol readings. “It will
help us identify
patients at risk
so we can try to
help them as
soon as possible.”

39 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Canada is not...

Fed study...

“I don’t think an
extra 12 months is
unreasonable to ask,”
said the minister.

❰❰ 18

confidence in the justice system are similar to those of citizens
in other western countries.
Such views have remained
relatively stable over the last 10
years, even as crime rates have
fallen.
“Canadians have less confidence that the CJS (criminal justice system) is helping
victims of crime,” Fraser concludes.
“Canadians also have less
confidence in some functions
of the courts and corrections
system, particularly sentencing practices, providing justice
quickly, rehabilitating offenders and releasing the right offenders at the right time.”
The report links the poor
opinion of Canadians to a “lack
of understanding of the specific mandates of courts and
corrections,” and says public
education is the favoured approach to correcting misperceptions.
The Conservative government has made some elements
of public opinion the cornerstone of its justice policy, imposing mandatory minimum
sentences to remove discretion
from judges, and promoting a
victims’ charter of rights.
“It’s legislation by popular
opinion on many complex justice issues,” says MP Francoise
Boivin, the NDP’s justice critic.
“The way that the Conservatives have been acting on criminal justice bills, it’s been kind of
catering to these impressions.”
Boivin, a lawyer who once
practised criminal law, says
the justice system can be improved, especially in its treat-

ment of victims. But Canadians
also need to be better educated
about the system rather than
“just exacerbating their preconceived impressions.”
Media reports and the Conservatives’ own claims about
criminal justice can distort reality, she said.
The Liberal justice critic said
he was surprised that public
opinion has remained static
even as crime rates have fallen.
“The empirical evidence in
terms of crime rates and rates
of re-offence don’t justify the
pessimism that appears to exist,” MP Sean Casey, a lawyer,
said in an interview from Charlottetown.
The Conservative justice
agenda, he said, is “playing on
perceptions, stereotypes and
fears as opposed to the evidence.”
The study notes the often-reported phenomenon that much
crime goes unreported, but says
only about 15 per cent of Canadians decline to report crime
because they lack faith in the
justice system.
“The three primary reasons
people report crimes are when
they are serious in nature, involve substantial loss or physical injury, or when insurance
payments require them to do
so,” says the study, citing research on the failure to report
many crimes.
A spokesman for Justice Canada, Andrew Gowing, said the
report was “an opportunity to
synthesize existing research on
public confidence in the Canadian criminal justice system.”
“At this time, no further steps
are planned.” ■

“We can start this road revolution in small towns and eventually cover a bigger scale,” Eugenio told the Inquirer.
After submitting the petition
to the Supreme Court, the participants proceeded to the Senate in Pasay City and filed the
people’s initiative to pass the
proposed share the roads law.

tion was a “golden opportunity”
to help boost efforts to achieve
the best air quality possible.
In a statement, Paje expressed gratitude to the petitioners for “potentially opening
a new chapter in Philippine environmentalism.”
He said, “Rest assured that
whatever the outcome of the
petition, the DENR will continue to strive to attain the best
air quality achievable with the
help of all the stakeholders, including the petitioners.” ■

❰❰ 23

Immigration at a higher price
point

“Does the scrapping of the
immigrant investor program
target rich Chinese immigrants
specifically,” asked one reporter point-blank.
The minister answered,
“Frankly, we should have suspended this program many
years ago and if I have one regret as immigration minister
is that I did not have done this
before.”
According to Citizenship and
Immigration Canada, data for
the past 20 years indicated that
the average investor-immigrant paid $200,000 less in taxes than a skilled federal worker,
and almost $100,000 less than a
live-in caregiver.
“We were not getting any economic advantages from it,“ said
the minister.
However, a replacement program is in the works.
“One pilot project Minister
Alexander is developing is having economic immigrants at a
higher price point, making [the
loan] at risk, and having actual
investment to support some
start-up business that can lead
to innovation in Canada and
create real jobs. Never again
will investors in Canada get a
fully guaranteed, no-risk loan.
If they want to enjoy the benefits of living in Canada, they
have to live here and they want
to become citizens, and have
a real, at risk investment at an
innovative sector,” Mr. Kenney

Minister Jason Kenney

explained.
Reeling the employers in

The minister also explained
that the government will try to
get the support and cooperation of employers and provincial governments through the
“expression of interest” pool to
attract those individuals whose
skills Canada most need.
This model follows the programs in other developed countries that are accepting immigrants.
“[Their] employers are more
involved in choosing their immigrants. In Canada, some of
the [new immigrants] go to big
cities, can’t get their credentials
recognized, they don’t have Canadian experience. They get

PCI FILE PHOTO

underemployed, they work in
survival jobs, their skills atrophy and they get frustrated.
That is too often the experience
here in Canada,” said Mr. Kenney.
Immigrants in Australia, for
example, earn on average far
more than the immigrants in
Canada.
Through the changes, it is
hoped that the value of Canadian citizenship will be protected, while creating a faster
and more efficient process for
those applying to get it. It is also
hoped that with the new laws,
those immigrating to Canada
will no longer be at the mercy
of socio-economic barriers that
are preventing them—and Canada—from moving forward. ■

‘Give us’...
nila University and
San Beda College.
Carrying
papers
with the statement “I support
road-sharing,” the participants
included women, children, doctors, elderly and persons with
disabilities.
Some biking enthusiasts “fed
up with the country’s traffic
congestion, high cost of transportation, noise and air pollution” also joined the activity. A
wheelchair-bound elderly man,
who carried his dog, took part
in the walk.
Ateneo law student Clariesse
Chan, one of the convenors of
❰❰ 12

the Share the Road Movement,
said that the “time for talk is
over.”
Walkers blocked

Before they filed the petition,
the walkers were blocked by police officers who had set up barricades on Padre Faura Street.
But the walkers showed the police that what they were waging
was a “peaceful revolution.”
The group quietly proceeded
to the Supreme Court and waited for the flag-raising ceremony
to end before some representatives entered the building and
filed the petition.

Asked how he saw the implementation of the road-sharing
principle in the country, San
Beda law student Paolo Burro
told the Inquirer that the group
was targeting a “slow implementation” of the scheme.
“We can start by giving wide,
safe and clean walkways for pedestrians,” he said.
With these “simple projects,”
people will realize the impact
that these can do to the streets,
Burro said.
Ateneo law student Det Eugenio said it was time to show
to the people that road-sharing
was possible.
www.canadianinquirer.net

Golden opportunity

Environment Secretary Ramon Paje welcomed the filing in
the Supreme Court of the writ
of kalikasan on road-sharing.
Although he was among the
respondents, Paje said the peti-

With a report from Jeannette I.
Andrade

Business

FEBRUARY 21, 2014 FRIDAY 40

BSP chief calls for
calm in markets

Gov’t unveils suite of poverty
reduction measures

Investors urged to watch how economic data
unfold

Aquino administration aims to halve number of poor Filipinos

BY PAOLO G. MONTECILLO
Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE CENTRAL bank has called
for calm in financial markets
following statements by the
United States’ top monetary official emphasizing the need for
continued stimulus to support
the American economy.
This comes amid the continued volatility in financial markets due to jitters over the pace
of the tapering of the US Federal Reserve’s monthly bondbuying program.
“As expected, Fed Chair (Janet) Yellen emphasized the
principles of the continuity of
policy, of being data-dependent, and of not having a preset course on policy,” Governor
Amando M. Tetangco Jr. of the
Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas
(BSP) said. “This means the
markets will be well-served
if they are circumspect and if
they also watch how the economic data unfold.”
In her first appearance before US lawmakers earlier this
week, Yellen said the US Fed
would not make any abrupt
changes inmonetary policies in
theworld’s biggest economy.
She hinted that the Fed would
continue cutting its monthly
bond-buying program, which

stands at $65 billion from the
original $85 billion. But the
newly appointed Fed chief
added that policies supportive
of growth would be maintained
until more signs of a stronger
recovery become apparent.
The Fed’s asset purchases or
quantitative easing were introduced in late 2009 to drive interest rates down in support of
the American economy.
The BSP reported that its
gross international reserves,
which serve as the last line of
defense from external economic shocks, stood at $78.94 billion in January. This was $4.3
billion lower than the $83.17
billion recorded the previous
month. The BSP attributed the
drop to its foreign exchange operations.
Although the BSP allows
market forces to determine the
peso’s movements, the central
bank intervenes in foreign exchange markets from time to
time to smoothen out extreme
movements in the peso’s value
against the dollar.
Latest data from the central
bank showed that net outflow
of foreign investments from
the start of the year to Jan. 24
reached $1.13 billion, a stark
reversal from the net inflows of
$1.19 billion in the same period
a year ago. ■

BY MICHELLE V. REMO
Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE AQUINO administration’s latest poverty reduction
roadmap—which provides for
more investments in social services, infrastructure and skills
training—is expected to halve
the number of poor Filipinos in
less than a decade.
Socioeconomic
Planning
Secretary Arsenio Balisacan
said that under the updated
medium-term Philippine Development Plan (PDP), which
is set to be released today, the
country’s provinces will be divided into three categories.
Category 1 under the updated
PDP covers highly populated
areas with robust commercial
activities.
Examples are Metro Manila
and progressive provinces such
as Pangasinan.
Balisacan said one antipoverty measure to be implemented
in areas under this clasis sification was the conduct of skills
training to people from lowincome households so they can
take advantage of employment
opportunities.
Because areas under this category already accommodate
more businesses than others,
Balisacan said the key to help
businesses get the right people

to meet their requirements.
Category 2, on the
other hand, covers
areas with limited
opportunity for economic growth because of their smaller population and
isolation from centers of
commerce, such as the Autonomous Region in Muslim
Mindanao (ARMM).
This category also covers
provinces with great tourism
potential, Balisacan said.
The major antipoverty measure under this category is the
implementation of infrastructure projects that will connect
them to commercial centers
and make them more accessible to tourists.
Category 3, meanwhile, includes areas that are most
prone to natural calamities and
disasters. Examples are provinces in Eastern Visayas, Balisacan said.
Measures to fight poverty
in these areas include investments in disaster-resilient infrastructure and programs that
will enhance local governments’
capacity to respond to disasters.
He noted that disasters,
because of the resulting disruption to businesses, have
a tendency to pull nonpoor
households into poverty.

Balisacan said the strategies
under each category were formulated according to what government thinks will have the
greatest and most immediate
positive impact.
“The objective is to accelerate poverty reduction. With
the plan, [halving poverty incidence] can be achieved much
earlier,” Baliscan told the INQUIRER.
He said trimming poverty
incidence by half in less than
a decade was possible with the
successful implementation of
the updated PDP, under which
economic growth of above 7
percent is expected to be sustained.
Balisacan, who is also director general of the National
Economic and Development
Authority (Neda), cited the success of other Asian economies
in speeding up the pace of poverty reduction.
❱❱ PAGE 46 Gov’t unveils

‘Hot money’ flows out of PH
BY PAOLO G. MONTECILLO
Philippine Daily Inquirer
MOST FOREIGN portfolio
investors divested their Philippine interests last month,
letting go of holdings of listed
shares, government IOUs and
time deposits, and took their
cash back to the United States.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) yesterday said that
sentiment on the Philippines
turned sour, reflecting the
overall “bearishness” toward
emerging markets around the
world.
This was brought on by the
US Federal Reserve’s decision

last January to scale back its
massive monthly bondbuying
program to give the American
economy a chance to stand on
its own feet.
“Outflows for the month nearly doubled ... as investors started
to divert funds back to the United States as the economy exhibited more signs of recovery,” the
BSP said in a statement.
Foreign portfolio investments, or “hot money,” reversed to a net outflow of $1.8
billion in January from a net
inflow of $1.27 billion in the
same month last year. This was
the biggest monthly outflow on
record.
Hot money investments are

short-term placements that
can be brought in or out of a
country with ease. Most are
invested in shares listed on the
Philippine Stock Exchange,
government securities, and peso-denominated time deposits.
Registered investments in
January reached $1.3 billion—
less than half the $2.8 billion in
gross investments that entered
the country the year before.
These investments were offset
by the $3.1 billion that flowed
out of the country last month.
The biggest outflow was seen
in investments in government
securities, where $1.5 billion
in cash left the country. Net
outflows from listed shares
www.canadianinquirer.net

reached $209 million, while
outflows from time deposit
stood at $169 million.
The United States, the United
Kingdom, Singapore, Luxemburg and Belgium were the top
five investor countries of the
month, cornering 77.9 percent

of the total.
The flow of hot money is the
most volatile component in the
country’s balance-of-payments
position, which is a summary
of all transactions between the
Philippines and the rest of the
world. ■

Sports/Horoscope

41 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Canada increases its medal total to 17 with two more silvers at Sochi Olympics
The Canadian Press
SOCHI, RUSSIA—Canada is still
in the mix for the most overall
medals at the Sochi Olympics after capturing a pair of silvers on
Tuesday, but the leaders may be
starting to pull away.
Canada’s team has a goal of
winning the most medals in
Sochi, and silvers from halfpipe skier Mike Riddle and the
women’s short-track relay team
helped keep the leading Dutch
and American teams in sight.
But time may be running out,
with just five days of competition
left. Like Canada, the U.S. will
win a medal in women’s hockey,
and will likely at least match the
Canadian team in men’s hockey
and women’s bobsled.
Canada could make up a couple of medals in curling, where
the men and women’s teams
will compete in Wednesday’s
semifinals. Neither the Dutch

nor the Americans are factors
in those events.
Canada can also move closer
to a men’s hockey medal when
they pay 11th-ranked Latvia in
Wednesday’s
quarter-finals.
Latvia shocked Switzerland 3-1
Tuesday to set up a favourable
matchup for the defendingchampion Canadians.
Canada has 17 medals (four gold,
nine silver, four bronze) through
Day 12 of the Games, good for fifth
place. The Netherlands and the
U.S. each have 20, while host Russia has 19 and Norway 18.
Germany leads the gold-medal table with eight.
Riddle’s silver increased
Canada’s medal count in freestyle skiing to on Olympic-best
seven (three gold, three silver,
one bronze).
The native of Sherwood Park,
Alta., overcame wet and snowy
conditions at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park to score 90.60 points
on his final run. That was bet-

tered only by the 92 scored by
David Wise of the United States.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Riddle. “I put down a good run in
what were difficult conditions.
I knew I had a chance.”
Riddle said he’d never done
the combination that won him
the medal—back-to-back double cork 1260.
Ski halfpipe is making its
Olympic debut in Sochi, thanks
in part to the efforts of Canada’s Sarah Burke, who died in a
training accident in 2012.
“I don’t think we would be
here without her,” said Riddle.
“Ski halfpipe has got to where it
is because of her.”
While Canada’s freestyle ski
team has exceeded expectations in Sochi, its short-track
speedskating team has been a
disappointment.
The women’s 3,000-metre
relay team won just the second
short-track medal for Canada
at the Sochi Games with Marie-

Eve Drolet of Chicoutimi, Que.,
Jessica Hewitt of Kamloops,
B.C., Valerie Maltais of Le Baie,
Que., Marianne St-Gelais of
St. Felicien, Que., and Jessica
Gregg of Edmonton finishing
second behind South Korea.
Silver seems to be Canada’s
destiny lately at the Games,
with the women being bumped
up from third to second place
after China was disqualified
for not clearing the track fast
enough after passing the baton.
It was a welcome result for
Canada’s team, which seemed
poised for a medal haul after
Charles Hamelin won gold in
the men’s 1,500 metres early on
but has suffered bad luck since.
“The medal helps take away
some of the pain,” St-Gelais said.
The result came after Hamelin fell in qualifying in the men’s
500, an event in which he was
the defending champion.
Canada may yet win another
medal in short-track, as Mal-

tais advanced out of the heats of
the women’s 1,000 metres with
an Olympic-record time of one
minute 28.771 seconds.
Canada is also poised for a
medal in women’s bobsled, with
Calgary’s Kaillie Humphries
and Heather Moyse of Summerside, P.E.I., sitting in second
place after two runs.
The defending Olympic champions are solidly in medal contention, though they have a lot
to do in Wednesday’s final two
runs as they trail the American
sled of Elana Meyers and Lauryn Williams by 0.23 seconds.
“We don’t really look at times
so I don’t even know how big
the gap is,” Humphries said.
“And we don’t want to know.
“Heather and I go in and focus on ourselves. I have no idea
how anyone else did, how their
runs were. We stick to us.”
“We just try to have fun,” she added. “Knowing where other people are just complicates that.” ■

HOROSCOPE
ARIES

CANCER

LIBRA

CAPRICORN

(MARCH 21 - APRIL 19)

(JUNE 22 - JULY 22)

(SEPT 23 - OCT 22)

(DEC 22 - JAN 19)

The hard work and good business sense that you’ve put into
your job may finally be paying off, Aries. Expect
some positive changes to take place at the workplace this week. Today you’re likely to be feeling
especially energetic and decide to give your house
a thorough cleaning. Don’t try to do this on your
own, however. You need to conserve your energy.
Get other members of your household to help!

Expect a lot of letters and
phone calls from lovers, close
friends, or children today, Cancer. You might
also want to make a few yourself. Some positive and interesting information may have come
your way that you’ll want to share with those
close to you. You’ll want to make sure that you
remember whatever it is you learn today, Cancer, as it could prove valuable in the future.

Your intuition, physical and
intellectual energy, and insight
are at an all-time high today, Libra. You’ll probably want to spend much of the day alone,
reflecting on your ideas and deciding how you
want to put them to work for you. At some point,
you may want to put your thoughts in writing.
You could also tune in more strongly than usual
to the thoughts and feelings of others.

You’re very intuitive by nature,
Capricorn, and today you
should be feeling especially so. Don’t be surprised if you spontaneously tune in to the ideas
and emotions of those around you, or even if
you and someone else come up with the same
words at the same time. Use your insights. You
might also find that they bring artistic inspiration
and even advance your worldly ambitions.

TAURUS

LEO

SCORPIO

AQUARIUS

(APRIL 20 - MAY 20)

(JULY 23 - AUGUST 22)

(OCT 23 - NOV 21)

(JAN 20 - FEB 18)

Insights that may come welling
up from the past could be put
to work for you in a positive way, Taurus. You
could use them as inspiration for a creative
project of some kind, or you could just make
them work for you in your day-to-day dealings
with others. You should be feeling especially
romantic and sexy today. Relations with lovers
should be close and passionate.

Studying some paperwork
involving your finances could
bring a pleasant surprise. You’re better off than
you thought, Leo! Dividends or benefits of some
kind might be forthcoming. You could decide to
treat yourself, buy some gifts for your family, or
perhaps do some work on your home. Do take
care to avoid impulse buying. You don’t want
your funds to disappear as quickly as they came!

You could well be bubbling over
with physical energy today, Scorpio. You might want to spend your day visiting
with friends. You could pick up some interesting
information from them, which you might be able
to put to work for you. You could lay plans for
finally attaining a long-term goal; perhaps a lucky
break made this possible. Expect to spend most
of your day talking and planning!

This should be one of those
days when you feel as if you
could conquer the world. You feel strong and
determined, Aquarius, and willing to do whatever
it takes to get wherever you want to be. A goal
could be attained at this time, ambitions realized,
or perhaps a lucky break could come your way.
This is an excellent day to seek a new job, ask for
a raise, or make a favorite project a success.

GEMINI

VIRGO

SAGITTARIUS

PISCES

(MAY 21 - JUNE 21)

(AUG 23 - SEPT 22)

(NOV 22 - DEC 21)

(FEB 19 - MAR 20)

Your home might need some
work today, Gemini. This might
simply involve a thorough cleaning, or it could
mean major repairs of some sort, perhaps
plumbing or electrical. If the latter, it isn’t a
good idea to try to do this yourself. There could
be factors involved that are more complicated
than they seem. Don’t be afraid to call in a
professional.

Today some information might
come your way that inspires you to
come up with some valuable new ideas, Virgo. Your
own intuitive faculties are operating at a very high
level, and therefore your insights could prove valuable.
Make sure you cover every possible contingency.
This knowledge could be used to advance your own
career and financial interests, so you may want to
spend an hour or two writing down your thoughts.

Visitors in your home, perhaps
invited by others in your household, could put a crimp in your desire to be alone
and hash out your thoughts today, Sagittarius.
Your mind is sharp and ideas should come thick
and fast. Don’t get so irritated with the situation
at home that you sabotage your plans. You might
want to go off somewhere by yourself, possibly to
simply sequester yourself in your own room.

www.canadianinquirer.net

A business or love partner
could bring opportunities for
advancement your way today, Pisces. You may
decide to draft or execute legal papers that
could be very important to your future. Romance
looks promising today. Your confidence and
enthusiasm are showing in your face and could
make you seem more attractive than usual. In
the evening, plan an intimate celebration!

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

42

Travel

Friendly residents, colourful
customs make Myanmar a
unique destination
BY TAMSYN BURGMANN
The Canadian Press
MANDALAY,
MYANMAR—
Jumping bumps and swerving
around potholes, two dusty Canadians motorbiking toward
an ancient spirit festival just
up the road from Mandalay are
practically greeted by a welcoming committee.
Burmese women with cherubic cheeks smeared golden with
ground-bark makeup rattle
shiny silver pots. A boy of about
10 nearly tumbles into the road,
teetering on one foot to score
high-fives from the scooting
passersby.
Plastic-horn blasts herald
their arrival among the throngs.
Coconut-coated sweets are
gifted by cross-legged hawkers
with Libra scales. A whirlwind
of neon scarves sweeps the duo
into a crush of hugs and flying
roses and frenzied ceremonial
dancing.
A photo-snapping duel ensues. Locals, who’ve congregated this steamy afternoon to party hard in the tiny village smack
dab in the centre of Myanmar,
are curious and elated by their
alien visitors.
“What country you come
from?” is the common icebreaker.
It’s the reception foreign
travellers often get.
Shuttered for 50 years until recently by a repressive
military regime, the Southeast
Asian country also known as
Burma is a quirky tapestry of
huge-hearted people yearning
to connect with the rest of the
planet.
Though the rapidly reforming nation likely still seems a
dauntingly elusive destination
from the vantage point of Joe
Canadian, that perception appears to be changing owing

to spreading word-of-mouth
about truly unique sojourns.
“Everything is really as if it’s
locked in a time capsule,” said
Karen Butler, a long-time Toronto resident who journeyed
through Myanmar for three
weeks in January.
“People approach very openly.
They want to speak with you.
They want to practise their English. They are really interested
in asking questions about you
and the outside world. They’re
very friendly, very smiley.”
It’s now been more than
three years since the country that shares many climate
and cultural similarities with
neighbouring Thailand opened
its polls and released from
house arrest Nobel Peace Prize
winner Aung San Suu Kyi. The
government’s reforms won it
improved ties with Western
countries, jump-starting tourism.
More than one million foreigners visited Myanmar in a
single year for the first time in
2012, according to the country’s
hotels and tourism ministry.
Among them, 6,485 were Canadian.
Finally on the map, the
number of visits to Myanmar
is expected to keep climbing.
Friction between the moving
parts of an entire society being
rejigged, however, is already
changing the nation, both for
better and for worse.
Hence why sooner rather
than later is best to high-tail it
to the luscious land of rice paddies and the mighty Irrawaddy
River, equally replete with pagodas gleaming like gold thimbles when seen from the sky and
omnipresent Buddhist monks
wrapped in maroon robes.
Indiana Jones’-sized courage is not required. Despite
the lack of infrastructure and
a well-needed deep clean, with

just a few preparatory steps,
such as a visa, the right money
and necessary immunizations,
Myanmar’s must-sees can be
journeyed to safely and in relative comfort.
Two billboards, erected side
by side outside Yangon’s airport, simultaneously advertise
the country’s popular Myanmar Beer—”Warmly welcome
our country, our brand”—and
state in stark lettering: “Drug
offense is a serious crime and it
can get the death penalty.”
There are definite rules to
be followed here, but if visitors abide by them (such as
by staying only at designated
guesthouses) their holiday
will be smooth and intoxicating. They’ll experience colourful customs (double-smooch
the sky to get service), a strong
activist subculture (political cartoons have a long history) and cuisine representing
Myanmar’s vast ethnic diversity (point-to-pick Shan joints,
wild-gathered Kachin salads,
Burmese noodle soups).
The pulse of progress is
strongest in modernizing Yangon, a wacky city with cabbies
driving cars with the steering
wheel on the wrong side, vendors dangling Aung San Suu Kyi
T-shirts and chi-chi shisha bars
frequented by the children of
infamous cronies.
Purchase handicrafts and
traditional longyi sarongs in
the labyrinthine Bogyoke Aung
San (Scott) market, stroll in
daytime around the hoard of
treasure that is 2,500-year-old
Shwedagon Pagoda and join the
crowd gorging on skewers of
barbecued meat for dinner on
19th Street.
Travellers’ next move should
involve either busing or flying
to Mandalay, another former
capital, where historic sites
worthy of lengthy queues can

Ancient temple in Myanmar.

instead be enjoyed in princely
peace.
Run fingers along 1,774 marble slabs inscribed with Buddhist text—dubbed the world’s
largest book—and climb barefoot up Mandalay Hill to reach a
breathtaking panorama. Many
visitors avoid the imposing palace compound, which was reconstructed by forced labour in
the early 1990s.
Onwards comes the choice of
tried-and-true route via sea or
air to the archeological ruins
in Bagan—an awesome moonscape of countless crumbling
temples explored by foot or
hot-air balloon—and then touristy Inle Lake. For the more
adventurous, trekking in the
mountains around the Shan
state towns of Hsipaw, Kalaw
and the little-visited Kyaukme
offers stunning vistas and profound cultural encounters.
Travellers seeking serenity
on their own terms might also

fly to the northernmost accessible city of Myitkyina, not
dangerous though located in
conflict-ridden Kachin state.
It’s also the jumping-off point
to Indawgyi Lake—open to foreigners but rarely visited.
Late summer, the view overlooking the irrepressible Irrawaddy River from open-air
Jingpo Duu restaurant is a
dreamscape of wispy mashedpotato clouds just eclipsing distant mountains. Two temples
shine like new pennies on the
opposite shore.
Tourists would pay a premium for such picture-perfect
dining in Canada, suggests resident John Sanlin.
“Not here. This is not like
Yangon. There are no traffic
jams,” he says, gesturing across
the river. “If you have time, go
to the frontlines. Sleep with the
soldiers. One candle, then bed.”
Hospitality right to the finish. ■

Travel

43 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2014

Russian bathhouse traditions
live on in the Sochi region
during the Olympics
BY TAMSYN BURGMANN
The Canadian Press
KRASNAYA POLYANA, RUSSIA—”What's
the
score?”
asks Svetlana Fedorenko as
she enters a bathhouse in the
Caucasus Mountains with her
husband and friends: The U.S.Russia hockey game was on,
and most of the country was
glued to a television.
A few miles away from the
ski slopes of Krasnaya Polyana,
where athletes are competing
for Olympic medals, an outdoor
bathhouse called British Banya
is attracting visitors.
Russians feel so strongly
about the banya, a ritual of
sweating it all out in a steam
room and whipping each other
with bunches of leafy branches,
that even a crucial game between the old rivals can't stand
in the way of this weekend tradition.
Bathhouse master Ivan
Tkach starts his preparations
late in the afternoon, at least
three hours before the bathing party arrives. He chops the
wood, heats up the stove in one
room, builds a fire for the Native American sweat lodge, and
ignites the blaze beneath a Japanese hot tub, which swings on
chains from wooden poles.
“The most important thing
about the banya is to have a
good spirit in the body,” Tkach
explains. “When people come
to the bathhouse, it is not only
about warming up the body, but
more importantly about relaxing, getting the toxins out of the
body, and, psychologically, leaving the worries behind.”
The banya is an institution
in Russia. It's a place where
businessmen deals have been
struck and romantic comedies
have been set. Russians even
have a special greeting for each
other as they emerge: “Happy
light steam!”
The bathhouse traditions
go way back. One of the earliest and most vivid mentions of
the banya in Russia chronicles
Princess Olga in the late 10th
century avenging her husband's death by inviting his killer's emissaries to have a bath

Go for the food: How
to do fine dining with
a view of Mardi Gras
parades in New Orleans
BY TAMSYN BURGMANN
The Canadian Press

Interior of a traditional Russian bathhouse

in Kyiv. She then set fire to the
bathhouse while they were enjoying themselves inside.
Russian bathhouse owners
are more welcoming these days.
Tatyana Larkin has been running the British Banya for seven
years since moving from Moscow to start a business of her
own. The 46-year-old entrepreneur says she's been a fan of the
banya for so long that “when I
faced the choice of what to do
next, I didn't have that many
options.”
Larkin says Krasnaya Polyana is the ideal place for a bathhouse.
“People come here for a vacation, they ski, they need to have
something to do,” she says.
Larkin describes her bathhouse as an “interactive museum of bathhouse art.” Its
name was inspired by a visit to
the British Museum in London,
where she was struck to see a
sprawling collection of exhibits
from around the globe.
“Our grounds are, of course,
not as big as to present the entire collection of bathhouse
traditions across the world, but
we've tried our best to display
the key points so that people
can find out about them,” she
says.
One of the highlights of this
bathhouse is a Native American
sweat lodge, a narrow hut that
consists of a frame covered with
layers of thick felt. A bathhouse
master puts hot stones in the

middle of the hut, pours water
on it, and lets the people sitting
around it enjoy the steam.
Bathhouse master Ivan
Tkach is worried: The bathing party is still lounging in the
aroma-therapy room, tarrying
over tea. “We're losing steam,”
Tkach complains to a colleague.
“Can't they understand?”
The steam room is the pinnacle of a Russian bathhouse experience. Tkach, who has been
heating up the stove for hours,
is afraid the guests will feel that
the steam “has died out.”
Valery Fedorenko, a 48-yearold businessman from Krasnodar, comes out of the aroma
room with a red towel around
his hips and a woolen hat on his
head. It's a chilly evening and
the steam is evaporating from
his shoulders.
For Fedorenko, the weekly
bathhouse visit is “about recreation, health, the joy of friendship, life and longevity.”
He is in Sochi to see the
Olympics, but he had to quit
watching the hockey game in
his hotel room to make time
for his weekly bathhouse appointment—the one thing in his
planner that he never misses.
Fedorenko says he has been
teaching his four children, aged
4 to 27, to make the weekend
bathhouse visit a must.
“They all do it. All my friends
come over and we go in together,” he says. “You can't compare
it to anything else.” ■
www.canadianinquirer.net

NEW ORLEANS—VISITING
New Orleans for Mardi Gras
season? You'll find pizza, hot
dog stands and rolling carts of
cotton candy galore along the
parade routes, but some of the
city's finest fare can also be
consumed along St. Charles Avenue, the main drag for the biggest and glitziest star-studded
processions of Carnival.
Some restaurants even have
grandstands that put viewers
at eye level with floats and just
above the throngs of street revelers jockeying for beads with
outstretched arms.
Herbsaint, a French bistrostyle restaurant on St. Charles
near the middle of the parade
route, offers viewing spots for
diners from its grandstands for
$35 to $50, depending on the
night, but also has dining-room
windows fronting the route.
“I can't think of too many
spaces where you can actually sit in a restaurant and have
that nice bottle of burgundy,
that nice meal, and then just
sit there and just watch the
parades go by,” said chef and
owner Donald Link. “It's a neat
experience.”
Link said this will be the restaurant's 14th Mardi Gras, and
after experimenting with buffets, special menus and scaledback menus, what works best
is regular dinner service inside
with the option of stand-viewing outside. That means the
opportunity to indulge in Herbsaint standards like duck confit
and dirty rice, beef short ribs

with potato cakes and gumbo—
all while taking in the Carnival
revelry.
“We serve our wine in the
right glasses, and nothing
changes,” Link said. “It's the experience you want to come here
for any night of the year.”
Like several restaurants,
Herbsaint is closed on Mardi
Gras (March 4 this year), but
most downtown parades happen in the days and weeks
before the holiday. Zulu, Rex
and two other clubs, known
as krewes, parade on Carnival
day. More than 30 others are
scheduled from Feb. 21 through
Lundi Gras, the Monday before
Mardi Gras, including the starstudded Bacchus, Endymion,
Muses and Orpheus parades.
“It's a busy time for us, but
it's a fun time,” said Anthony
Scanio, chef de cuisine at Emeril's Delmonico, which is owned
by celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse and is also located along
the St. Charles route. There, patrons can watch parades from
the main dining area while enjoying a fine meal with some
Carnival-inspired touches, like
a Mardi Gras “king's cup” cocktail and king cake doughnuts
sprinkled with Carnival colours
of purple, green and gold.
The menu also includes Louisiana delicacies like spicy cream
cheese boudin (sausage) balls,
chicken and andouille gumbo and
veal braciolone with spaghetti
and New Orleans red gravy.
The Brennan family-owned
Palace Cafe, which is toward
the end of the route where
St. Charles turns onto Canal
Street, offers fine dining with
three levels of parade views. ■

Motoring

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

What Is My Automobile Injury Claim Worth?
A 28 year old nurse who I represented last year was involved in
a car accident. She and her parents came to see me 3 months
after the accident. The insurance company had offered the
young nurse $5,000 dollars to
settle her claim. The young lady’s parents wanted to know if
she should accept the offer.
I answered this family’s questions with my own question in
return: “Are you feeling 100%
better?” The young nurse looked
at me and shook her head. She
explained that she was having headaches and that she had
returned to work because she
feared for her job. She had only
been with the hospital for 6
months and she did not feel that
she could take any more sick
days. After the young lady told
me her situation, I immediately
advised her that she should not
accept the settlement offer.
An important thing for an injury claimant to understand is
that when you accept a settlement—it is final. If you settle a
claim you cannot re-open it at a
later date—even if you do not re-

Rob Ford...
to attend this year’s
World Pride parade
hosted by Toronto,
Ford said: “I’ve never been to a
pride parade. So I’m not going
to change the way I am.”
Doug Ford has said he went
to the parade once with his children, though he wouldn’t again,
as he described it as an event
where “middle-aged men with
pot bellies” ran down the street
“buck naked.”
“I think it’s good for tourism,”
Doug Ford said on the YouTube
show. “But don’t try to put a gun
to anyone’s head that disagrees
with you. It doesn’t mean that
they hate gays.”
Rob Ford chimed in by saying
“it’s ridiculous,” but his brother
was not finished.
“It’s just a bunch of bullying,
a bunch of bullies coming after
you,” Doug Ford said. “The gay
community feels like they’ve
been bullied and rightfully
so because a lot of times they
have, Rob. But don’t come back
and try to bully the people that
don’t show up and call them homophobic.”
Doug Ford also asked rhetori❰❰ 18

cover. Furthermore, returning to
work does not stop you from advancing an income loss claim for
the future. The law compensates
all kinds of future losses. Things
like reduced hours, light duties
and/or loss of promotion are all
compensable.
In the case of our young nurse,
she remained on light duties for
a substantial period of time. Furthermore, due to her condition,
she stopped accepting lucrative
overtime shifts, which impacted
her income. Because the accident contributed to my client’s
reduced income, she was entitled to compensation for both
past and future losses. When the
claim ultimately settled, I am

proud to say that the nurse received $140,000. Over 25 times
the original offer!
If you or your family are involved in an accident—do not
be afraid to ask the simple question— What is my claim worth? ■
The author, Joel Zanatta, is
the managing partner of Hammerberg Lawyers, one of Vancouver’s foremost law firms
specializing in personal injury
and ICBC claims. Joel and his
team of lawyers have represented thousands of injury victims
throughout British Columbia.
Questions? Call 604 269 8500
ext. 126 or email jzanatta@hammerco.net.

FRIDAY 44

cally, “Do you know how many
gay friends that we have?”
Rob Ford, who lost most of his
mayoral powers late last year
after admitting he’d smoked
crack cocaine while in office,
and his brother used most of
the other videos in Tuesday’s
series to go after city councillors and other opponents.
Doug Ford referred to all but
a handful of councillors as “a
bunch of yahoos.”
The mayor said he was going
to list the top 10 Toronto councillors he wanted to see defeated in October’s municipal elections, but added more names
along the way and proceeded to
name 18.
“These people have gone out
of their way to, I personally
think, ruin Toronto, increase
taxes, strip me of my powers and
you know what? It’s time to put
up or shut up,” Rob Ford said.
“They wanted the war, they’re
going to get the war,” he said,
echoing a previous battle cry
he made after city council removed several of his powers—a
move he compared to the invasion of Kuwait. ■

Have you been in
a car accident?
Know your rights.
You have rights, entitlements, and choices with
your ICBC claim and should never be told differently.
Joel leads our team of personal injury lawyers. They’ve worked
successfully on thousands of files winning significant settlements for
people just like you. We will help resolve your claim comfortably and
get you the time you need to recover fully before returning to work.
We provide a translator and also welcome your enquires at no cost to you.

AD SALES
The Philippine Canadian Inquirer—Canada’s
first and only nationwide Filipino-Canadian
newspaper, is looking for dynamic sales
executives from Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary,
Winnipeg, and Edmonton.
Each sales executive must be a dynamic self
starter who will treat this opportunity as their
own exclusive business with the potential to
earn serious money.
That’s just Step 1. Wait till you hear about Step 2.
Interested? Send us your resume now and let’s
change your life!

Be part of an amazing in-store team!
We are currently recruiting for Sales Associate
and Customer Service Representative to join us in
Promenade, Toronto.

BY SARAH CASIMONG
Special to Philippine Canadian Inquirer
LEARNING THAT you are at risk of
weight-related diseases when you thought
you were healthy can be a lot to stomach.
New Life Alliance Church of North Vancouver recently discovered that the majority of its members—mostly Filipino—
are heavier than their ideal weight and
now they want to make some changes.
This year the church put on a heart
health-themed Valentine’s Day celebration to raise awareness about heart disease. Church nurses ran a booth that
measured the height, weight and waist
circumference of individuals to predict
those at risk of heart disease and diabetes. They used height and weight to measure the body mass index (BMI), and
calculated the waist-to-height ratio to
determine any health problems church
individuals may be in danger of facing.
Shiela Estuye, a kidney dialysis nurse
who was behind the heart-health booth,
compared results from both forms of
measurement and found that more than
half of the individuals who were measured fell under the overweight or obese
category. Estuye has no doubts that a
sedentary lifestyle and the Filipino diet
are partly responsible for these statistics.
For Filipinos, who count on white rice
as the staple of their diet and serve meats

that are high in saturated fats, there is a
higher risk of developing health problems
such as heart disease, stroke, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes.
But the same food that is putting the
health of Filipino Canadians at risk is
what brings them together. Traditional
food is often at the centre of many celebrations and gatherings—and church is
no exception. Every week after the pastor's sermon, New Life Alliance Church
members stay for lunch, provided by different assigned members every week. On
the table is always an array of everyday
Filipino favourites: chicken adobo, sinigang with beef, pork, pandesal, the occasional salad with dressing—and of course,
the all-important steamed white rice.
A healthier diet does not require these
foods to be cut out completely, but portion control and substitutions can make
a difference.
Angel Luk, registered dietitian and
founder of FoodMysteries, recommends
cutting down on fat intake— only 30-45
mL per day—and sticking to healthier
fats—monounsaturated and polyunsaturated—found in fish, nuts, vegetable oil
and non-hydrogenated margarine. “Butter, lard and shortening are delicious, but
they raise our [unhealthy] cholesterol levels so use these sparingly and limit them
to special recipes or occasions,” Luk said.
And although rice is the predominant food for Filipinos, carbs should

only make up one-quarter of your meal,
Luk said. "Choose whole grain varieties
whenever possible and limit white, refined grain products."
Another important tip: Pay attention
to portion sizes. "Eating a huge portion
of a lower-fat dish doesn't make it any
healthier than eating a small portion of
a higher-fat dish," Luk warned.
To see the church’s measurements
go down to the normal range, Reverend Cres Casimong is starting a sermon
series on healthier living from a biblical point of view. Next month, they are
starting The Daniel Plan, a program coauthored by Rick Warren, which incorporates faith, food, friends and fitness
for health in all areas of life.
"In the long-term we are hoping to
correct those [above healthy range] statistics and get them back to where they
should be,” Reverend Casimong said.
He admits there will be challenges,
but is hoping that the sense of community will be a benefit. “It’s harder for us
[Filipinos] to change [our habits] in a
way, because our food and diet is not
healthy. Individually, it’s going to be
very difficult, but with a support group,
together, we can help each other.”
The church is planning to track the
progress of its members to see if there
have been any significant changes to
their BMI and waist measurements by
the end of 2014. ■

Gov’t unveils...
“Experiences of other countries would show how poverty
reduction accelerated as they
kept a fast pace of economic growth,” he
said.
The Philippines recently became one
of the fastest growing economies in Asia
after its economy grew by 6.8 percent in
2012 and 7.2 percent last year. Despite
this, the country continued to have one
❰❰ 40

of the highest poverty rates in the region
at 25.2 percent in 2012.
Balisacan said the antipoverty roadmap should help make the country’s
growth inclusive, or felt by the majority
of the population.
Meantime, Balisacan said the government would augment the budget for the
conditional transfer program (CCT),
which is implemented across the coun-

try to lift more households out of poverty.
Under the CCT, the government
grants cash subsidies to the poorest
households.
Household beneficiaries are required
to send children to public schools, and
the mothers and their children to public
health centers for regular checkups in
exchange for cash. ■